What Part of ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ Don’t We Understand? – The New York Times

NASHVILLE — Thursday was an ordinary day at my house. All my loved ones were safely in the places where they should be. The hallucinogenic heat of the past week had finally broken. My husband was healing nicely from his recent surgery. Even so, I went through my usual tasks with a deep feeling of foreboding, a nagging sense that something was terribly wrong. I kept getting up from my desk, prowling around the house in an inchoate desolation I didn’t understand.

Then I remembered: It was execution day in Tennessee.

That night the state where I live killed a human being. They did it in the kind of premeditated, methodical way that would warrant the worst possible punishment in a murder trial. There’s a manual for every mandated step: the final meal, the final prayer, the final words, the mask. Witnesses watched as 1,750 volts of electricity coursed through the man’s body. Nobody who participated in carrying out this execution did so out of hatred for the man they killed. It was simply their job.

That’s what troubles me most about the death penalty: the mundanity of it. The expensive, bureaucratic, handbook-based protocol of the thing, as mechanical and dispassionate as restoring power after a storm, fixing potholes, putting out fires. In Tennessee, killing human beings is part of the normal course of government business. All in a day’s work.

All in a Republican’s day’s work, anyway. Twenty-one states — most recently New Hampshire — have outlawed the death penalty outright, and more than a third of the remaining 29 states haven’t executed a prisoner in a decade or longer. The few states where the death penalty is actively practiced are overwhelmingly red, which may explain why the United States attorney general, William P. Barr, announced last month that the federal government, which has not carried out an execution since 2003, will resume putting inmates to death in December. Little surprise that at a time when new death sentences are near historic lows, Tennessee is executing people at a precipitous rate.

To be sure, some of these inmates have committed unthinkably hideous crimes. Stephen Michael West, the man who was executed Thursday night, was on death row for raping and murdering 15-year-old Sheila Romines in 1986, and for murdering her mother, Wanda. Both were found dead of stab wounds that suggested they had been tortured, probably for hours, before they finally bled out. The story of their suffering is unbearable to read. Sheila Romines knew Ronnie Martin, the co-defendant in the crime, from school. He was 17.

Mr. West admitted to the rape but denied murdering either woman. His attorneys said he was paralyzed in the face of his accomplice’s brutality because he suffered from severe schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, the result of profound abuse as a child. At his trial, jurors were never told of his mental illness.

There is nothing about Mr. West’s case that would move staunch supporters of the death penalty to rethink their position, but the reasons for ending state-sanctioned murder are manifold: It fails to deter crime; it is far more expensive than life in prison without parole; it is racially biased. Perhaps most tellingly, death sentences are too often dealt to innocent people. Any one of those reasons, by itself, makes a compelling argument for ending executions altogether.

Even among the indisputably guilty, extenuating circumstances often cloud the issue. Is it right to execute an inmate who has been rehabilitated and displays sincere remorse? An inmate with dementia who no longer remembers his crime? An inmate whose mental illness is now being successfully treated? People who knew Mr. West said he had become a different man, and isn’t true rehabilitation justification enough for commuting his sentence to life without parole? As Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty tweeted a few days before the execution, “When an inmate’s severe mental illness is undisputed by the state’s own doctors, what does it take to show that life without parole is the appropriate sentence?”

But my own reason for wanting to end the death penalty is simpler than any of these arguments, as compelling as they truly are. As a Christian, I keep coming back to exhortations like “Thou shalt not kill” and “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone” and “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” It seems to me that Jesus was very clear on this question of mercy. At his own execution, he prayed, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”

I understand the fury of a family member who has lost a loved one to senseless violence. What I cannot understand are the people of faith who support executions as a “moral” position. The Catholic Church takes an unequivocal stand against capital punishment, but more than half of all American Catholics support the death penalty anyway. I suspect the numbers are far higher here in the South, where self-described “pro-life” voters have no problem electing politicians who support unfettered access to guns and the barbaric notion of “justice” that underlies the death penalty.

It’s important to note that not all conservatives support capital punishment. “I believe that the core tenet of conservatism is small, limited government,” Amy Lawrence, state coordinator of Tennessee Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told the Memphis Flyer last week. “Simply put, the death penalty is anything but small, limited government. It is a prime example of a bloated, broken government program. It is costly, it risks executing an innocent person, and it leaves the ultimate power over life and death in the hands of a fallible system.”

I had hope for Tennessee’s new governor, Bill Lee, on this particular question. Governor Lee has served as a board member and mentor for Men of Valor, a prison ministry designed to help inmates “become the men, husbands, fathers, and members of society that God created them to be.” During his campaign last year, he frequently mentioned the need for criminal-justice reform and cited his involvement with Men of Valor. As governor, however, he has not responded to invitations to pray with prisoners on death row, and he refused to grant clemency to the two inmates executed this year.

So it’s still Republican politics as usual here in Tennessee, and Stephen Michael West died in the electric chair on Thursday night. Asked if he had any final words, Mr. West said he did. “In the beginning, God created man,” he began before breaking into sobs. Then: “And Jesus wept. That’s all.”

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.