Copyright (C) 2003 Robert S. Rosson. All rights reserved.
The following is based on the true story of a member of the clergy in Southern New Jersey, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. He narrowly missed being sentenced to death. Imagine what might have happened had the jury recommended the death penalty.
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New Jersey State Prison: December 15, 2012. The procession proceeds slowly down the dimly lit corridor led by the Warden. The prisoner, wearing an orange Department of Corrections suit, his head covered by a skullcap, is flanked by two muscular guards. The Prison Rabbi walks behind, softly intoning The Psalm of David.
The prisoner, himself a Rabbi, had been convicted of hiring two men to bludgeon his wife and mother of their three children to death in order to pursue an adulterous affair. Six years after the event one of the killers, a former friend and a member of the Rabbi’s congregation, had come forward to confess and implicate the Rabbi.
The procession reaches the death chamber. The prisoner is strapped to the gurney, his arms outstretched. A needle is inserted into an arm vein and cardiac leads are placed over his chest. The Warden reads the death warrant and states that the Governor has denied the last minute plea for clemency.
The Rabbi, once a respected leader of the synagogue he founded, had been on Death Row for 10 years. He had taught and counseled his fellow inmates, mostly poor and uneducated. Their lawyers had largely been court appointees. Several had been executed. In the twenty-five years prior to his conviction thirteen men had been released from Death Row in Illinois when evidence, some based on DNA, had been found to exonerate them. All of the Rabbi’s legal appeals had been exhausted.
The Prison Rabbi asks the prisoner if he has any last words. The prisoner’s eyes fill with tears as his lips silently form the words “Shalom – Peace”. On a signal from the Warden the lethal fluids flow into the prisoner’s veins. He gives a convulsive gasp and stops breathing. The skullcap falls to the floor. An unseen doctor in an adjacent room checks the monitor and pronounces death. The Prison Rabbi picks up the skullcap and quickly leaves the chamber.
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Cherry Hill, NJ: November 15, 2002. That this scenario will not take place is most likely attributable to the fact that the Rabbi was white, affluent and a previously respectable citizen. His cause was no doubt aided by his last minute, impassioned Sermon on the Stand.
This case illustrates many of the problems inherent in the application of the death penalty. Why are some crimes considered more heinous than others? Are there degrees of heinousness? Are the rape and murder of a young girl in California or the murder of five innocent workers in a fast food establishment in New York more deserving of the death penalty than the murder of the Rabbi’s wife? Can the death penalty be applied evenly and fairly?
I do not pretend to have the answers. As a parent and a citizen, I am filled with anger and revulsion when I hear of these kinds of crimes. As a physician, however, I cannot condone the taking of human lives, even ones as reprehensible as these perpetrators. Life imprisonment without parole is in many ways a harsher penalty than death, and leaves open the possibility of a subsequent finding of innocence. The death penalty has not been found to be a convincing deterrent to major crime. The cost to society for one modality of punishment versus the other is probably equivalent, but in any case irrelevant.
The ideas expressed in this essay are more fully and eloquently asserted by the noted lawyer/author Scott Turow in an article in The New Yorker magazine of January 6, 2003. Essentially we come to the same conclusion: the death penalty should be abolished in favor of life imprisonment without parole, a more rational, humane and moral form of justice.
Published originally in YJHM: January 8, 2003
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