February 4, 2002

McVeigh prosecutor addresses death-penalty conference
___By Bob Smietana
___Religion News Service
___CHICAGO (RNS)--Beth Wilkinson wasn't the most well-known speaker at "A Call to Reckoning," a recent conference on the death penalty sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
___She was, however, probably the only speaker at the conference who had asked a jury to sentence someone to death.
___Wilkinson joined the ranks of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Cardinal Avery Dulles, Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, and former Sen. Paul Simon to address the Jan. 25 conference at the University of Chicago.
___A former federal prosecutor, Wilkinson gave the closing arguments at the sentencing hearing for Timothy McVeigh on June 12, 1997. "Serve justice," she told jurors. "Speak as the moral conscience of the community, and sentence Timothy McVeigh to death."
___Describing herself as a "struggling supporter" of the death penalty, Wilkinson told more than 400 people in attendance that she had been opposed to the death penalty when she was in college but that her views changed while she was serving as federal prosecutor in New York state.
___"I started to see true evil," she said. "I saw people I thought justified the death penalty as moral punishment."
___Still, Wilkinson said, she had not been part of a death penalty case before McVeigh's trial. She faced her own conflicted feelings about the morality of the death penalty while writing her closing arguments two days before the sentencing hearing.
___"Not until June 10 did I really confront my own moral questions and compass and prepare to stand there and ask 12 jurors to execute another human being," she confessed.
___As McVeigh's execution approached last fall, Wilkinson said she wondered if she would feel any moral conflicts about her role in his death penalty.
___"As it turned out," she said, "I felt nothing for McVeigh. I felt for the victims, but I felt nothing for McVeigh."
___Wilkinson said she is concerned, however, that the death penalty is applied unfairly. Because of that, she is co-chair of the Constitution Projects Death Penalty Initiative (www.constitutionproject.org), a group that has recommended reforms in the death penalty process. Their findings were recently published in a booklet called "Mandatory Justice."
___Most of the speakers at the conference argued that the death penalty could be justified on moral grounds. Dulles gave an overview of Roman Catholic teaching through history, which supported the right of the state, as an agent to God, to impose the death penalty. In keeping with Pope John Paul's 1995 encyclical "Evangelium Vitae," Dulles said the death penalty should be kept "on the books," but "killing should be avoided if the purposes of punishment can be obtained by bloodless means."
___In discussing Jewish perspectives on the death penalty, Professor David Novak of the University of Toronto said the debate for citizens has changed after the events of Sept. 11. He quoted President George W. Bush's call to "bring the terrorists to justice."
___"What kind of justice would we bring them to?" Novak asked. "What could we possibly do if we catch Osama bin Laden or one of his associates?"
___Novak argued bin Laden and his associates should receive the death penalty. He also reminded the audience that both a murder victim and a murderer "bear the divine image." Quoting from a Talmudic scholar, he said, "God himself suffers when the guilty are executed."
___In another reminder of Sept. 11, Islamic scholar and UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl was unable to give his remarks to the conference in person. Abou El Fadl wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times that appeared on Sept. 18 titled "What Happened to Tolerance in Islam" and has been critical of fundamentalist Islamic groups.
___He has been warned by police "not to stray from a secure home base" because of concerns for his safety and so gave his remarks via telephone. "Perhaps the moral thing to do in these times is not to travel," he said in his introduction.
___The most contentious segment of the conference came during a panel discussion between Scalia, Simon and Wilkinson, led by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne.
___Scalia, a Roman Catholic, said he disagreed with the position, reflected in "Evangelium Vitae," that the death penalty was somehow immoral.
___Instead, he said, two millennia of Catholic teaching support the morality of the death penalty. "I have given this new position careful consideration and I have rejected it," he said. "I do not feel that the death penalty is immoral."
___Scalia argued the "more Christian a society is," the more likely it is to see the death penalty as moral. "Abolition (of the death penalty) has taken hold in post-Christian Europe more than in church-going America," he said. "For believing Christians, death is no big deal. To the non-believer, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence."
___Several members of the audience challenged Scalia on his views. One said the death penalty is immoral because it is applied unfairly.
___"You want to have a fair death penalty," Scalia replied. "You kill, you die. Period. And my court said that's not a good idea."
___Simon also challenged Scalia on the morality of the death penalty, arguing that Christian teaching on moral matters has changed over the centuries. "There is no condemnation of the death penalty in the Bible," he said. He also pointed out that "there is no condemnation of slavery in the Bible" either, "yet we have not found slavery to be moral."
___Simon also said the death penalty system is flawed. Since 1976, he said, 12 people have been executed in Illinois, while 13 people have been released from death row and exonerated. Further, the lives of white murder victims are seen as more valuable than black victims' lives, he said.
___"In Florida, a murderer is four times more likely to receive the death penalty if the victim is white," he said. "In Illinois, they are 4.8 times more likely to receive the death penalty.
___"The question is not whether the death penalty is moral," Simon said. "The question is, 'Is it wise?'"

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