Till Death Do Us Part

A murder case ruling blew up on social media and for good reason. According to an article from The Charlotte Observer the 35 year old man accused of killing of a young woman on a train on August 22nd of last year was deemed to not stand trial for the crime:

DeCarlos Brown Jr. has been found “incapable to proceed” on the state murder charge brought against him in the killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, according to court filings. Brown, a 35-year-old homeless man who previously told police he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, faces both state and federal murder charges in the August light rail stabbing of 23-year-old Zarutska. The results of his capacity evaluation were revealed in a motion his state public defender filed in Mecklenburg Superior Court on Tuesday.

I could share the video of Brown killing Zarutska, but it is pretty graphic. The prosecution and US President Donald Trump both want Brown to get the death penalty for the murder:

In the motion, attorney Daniel Roberts asked a judge to again delay Brown’s Rule 24 hearing — in which prosecutors would have said whether they plan to seek the death penalty in the case.

President Donald Trump has called for Brown to face the death penalty, but a de-facto moratorium has blocked executions in North Carolina for the last 20 years.

The trial can’t go forward until his mental status allows him to grasp the weight of the charges:

The Rule 24 hearing scheduled for April 30 was previously delayed in order to give time for a capacity evaluation. Under state law, a defendant is capable to proceed if they can: understand the nature of their charges comprehend their role in court proceedings help their defense in a “rational and reasonable manner.”

The evaluation is holding up both the state and federal cases, but the federal prosecutor wants another opinion and will get one:

Brown’s evaluation report was completed inside Central Regional Hospital on Dec. 29, Roberts wrote. But, even with the results ready, Brown cannot appear in state court. He will remain in federal custody while his federal murder charge is pending, Roberts said in the motion. A U.S. magistrate judge previously ordered a second federal psychiatric exam for Brown’s federal case. Roberts asked that the state hearing be paused for six months, and Mecklenburg District Attorney Spencer Merriweather’s prosecutors said they would be OK with that, Roberts wrote.

My point isn’t to offer legal opinions on the case, but to address the bigger issue of the death penalty since that is what’s holding up the proceedings. As you might think, Christians are divided on the death penalty with some strongly in favor of it, some strongly against it with a lot of people mixed on it.

What Does The Bible Say?

3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. 4 For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. (Rom 13:3,4, NKJV)

Trust me when I tell you that the death penalty is in the Bible. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “an eye for an eye?” Well, there’s more to this than the simplicity of that oft used but misunderstood saying. Some would say that the Bible says that killing is wrong citing the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:13. Others believe it’s right in certain circumstances but not all. And there are those who feel that any such laws have been applied unevenly based on bad evidence, poor legal help or even prejudicially. One of the arguments I’ve heard is that taking the life of a convicted person denies them the opportunity to change and become a better person. When I was a young Christian a genuinely nice Catholic believer challenged me on my view on the death penalty. I told her the Bible says that some crimes demand it and she said I should take a more merciful view. She said that those who murder can change in prison and become productive members of society. To deny them that opportunity to change would be ungodly. Taking their life would be another wrong added to whomever they killed. However, others say that it’s a deterrent to further crime. But those who argue against the death penalty say that it really doesn’t keep more murders from happening so why do it. And it certainly isn’t a cure for those who we try to rehabilitate, they add. How can they change if they’re dead? Others also say it’s unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment. The question is whose view is right? Let’s take a look at these views one by one.

Humanistic Views

Instead of a moralistic view of the death penalty, which is based on Christian philosophy and theology, a humanist says that laws should deter and cure the criminal. However, if a sentence is meant to cure them, they then become a patient and not a criminal. A patient is a person who is sick and cannot be responsible for their actions thus taking away from them their free will to choose. They only did what their condition made them do. So, the death penalty as a way to reform criminals is not really a good way to view it. As part of that line of thinking the question is whether the death penalty is a deterrent at all. Some would say it isn’t, but in a study by Dr. Isaac Ehrlich of the University of Chicago who presented his views to the Supreme Court, the death penalty deters future murders by those criminals saving as many as seven or eight lives. While his findings continue to be challenged, they have been affirmed as recently as 2003 by Professors Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul R. Rubin, and Joanna M. Shepherd of Emory University who said that every criminal given the death penalty resulted in 18 fewer murders. And Professor Shepherd discovered in her own study that for each additional 2.75-year reduction in the death row wait until execution, one murder is deterred. I’d say that the answer is yes.

Constitutional? Racially Motivated?

Opponents of the death penalty maintain that it is applied unfairly, and if so, should not even be legal. And they add that it constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” based on the Eighth Amendment. However, the Supreme Court has ruled in Glossip v. Gross that the amount of pain in killing the criminal is the only basis for such a view, not the actual sentence. As for the racial question, in a 2007 article by David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D., a Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, a study was commissioned to see if racial inequities were involved in meting out the death penalty. He said this:

When first looking at the raw data without controlling for case characteristics, RAND found that large race effects with the decision to seek the death penalty are more likely to occur when the defendants are white and when the victims are white. However, these disparities disappeared in each of the three studies when the heinousness of the crimes was taken into account. The RAND study concludes that the findings support the view that decisions to seek the death penalty are driven by characteristics of crimes rather than by race.

A Teaching Moment

According to some, the death penalty teaches society the value of human life. According to a 2006 column by columnist Dennis Prager, such a case can be made:

Killing murderers is society’s only way to teach how terrible murder is. The only real way a society can express its revulsion at any criminal behavior is through the punishment it metes out. If murderers all got 10 years in prison and thieves all got 20 years in prison, that would be society’s way of saying that thievery is worse than murder. A society that kills murderers is saying that murder is more heinous a crime than a society that keeps all its murderers alive.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

We need to address this since it is one of the few Biblical arguments in favor of the death penalty. First, we need a little language clarity. In our day and age, the two words “murder” and “kill” are not the same. But when the King James translation was done they considered both to be the same. I like how an article from gotquestions.org explains this point:

The Old Testament uses over half a dozen different Hebrew words for the taking of a human life. In Exodus 20:13, the Hebrew word used is rasah, which means “murder.” It is the same word that the KJV correctly renders elsewhere as “murder” or “murderer,” including all eleven times that rasah appears in Numbers 35:17–31. Oddly, when they came to the sixth commandment, the KJV translators chose to translate the word as “kill” instead of “murder.” “Thou shalt not kill” is an incorrect and inconsistent translation. That mistranslation has created needless confusion and personal, moral conflict for centuries. Christians have debated with each other—and struggled in their own minds—over whether to serve in the military during war time, to use deadly force as a police officer, or even to protect their own families from homicidal attacks. It’s unfortunately true that protecting a nation, protecting society, and protecting loved ones sometimes require killing, but that is different from murder. The command “Do not murder” does not apply to justified killing in the course of one’s duty.

The article also deals with what appears to be a clear contradiction in the Old Testament:

The mistranslation of Exodus 20:13 has also caused believers and skeptics alike to question the reliability of the Bible and the character and justness of God. After all, after commanding the Israelites not to “kill” anyone, God orders them to kill criminals for capital crimes (Exodus 21:12–29), Israelites who worshipped the gods of Moab (Numbers 25:1–8), all Midianite males and non-virgin females (Numbers 31:1–18), and the pagan societies of Canaan (Deuteronomy 2:30–36; Joshua 6; 1 Samuel 15:1–3). Capital punishment for the crime of murder was, in fact, the first commandment God gave to Noah after the flood (Genesis 9:6). Plainly, the Bible distinguishes between a justified killing and murder, that is, unlawful (not legally justified) homicide in which the perpetrator intentionally kills another person. The penal codes of nations around the world have historically held a similar distinction. So what God forbids in the Ten Commandments is murder, specifically, not killing, in general.

So, What About Capital Punishment?

The Bible is quite clear that those who murder are to be killed. Opponents of capital punishment are certainly free to believe that murderers should live their lives out behind bars, but they can’t use the Bible to support it. Murder is abhorred by God. If you take someone’s life you must forfeit yours. God hates murder that much. And the Bible teaches there is a place for capital punishment. Clearly there should be safeguards against falsely sentencing an innocent person, but that doesn’t mean we stop doing it all. In the book How Would Jesus Vote, it says this:

Rather than the death penalty denying man’s dignity, it upholds it. When human beings deliberately and cold-bloodedly murder other human beings who are made in the image of God, the murderers have forfeited their right to life. Certainly they should be given the chance to repent and make their peace with God, but they also should pay for their crimes, even if that means paying with their very lives.

Only by misunderstanding the Bible and destroying the links between Jesus and His Father in the Old testament could one conclude that Jesus would oppose the death penalty.

What do I think? I think the death penalty is seen in the Bible and should be used. But not the way it’s administered now since many of these criminals live up to 22 years in prison before actually being executed. That means that some of those who mourned the loss of their loved ones often die before they see justice served. Yes, some wrongfully accused people do die or have been imprisoned, but that only accounts for 200 cases since 1973 and many of those sentences were reduced to life imprisonment. But those statistics are going down as forensic science gets better at gathering evidence among other things. Overall, the death penalty is not only Biblical, but a deterrence and should be used.