Citizen Healer, Do No Harm
By David Howard
01 March, 2006
Countercurrents.orgSince 1973, 122 people in the USA sentenced to death by the unanimous verdict of a jury of their peers, have been exonerated. How many other innocent men and women languish on death row, or worse, have been executed for crimes they did not commit?
Executing the wrong man is nothing new in the United States. In 1828, Patrick Fitzpatrick of Detroit was hanged for the rape and murder of an innkeeper’s daughter. Seven years later, his roommate confessed to the crime.
As a result of the Fitzpatrick case and other travesties of justice, the first official act of the new state of Michigan’s legislature was to ban the death penalty. On March 1, 1847, Michigan became the first English-speaking government in the world to outlaw executions. Now we commemorate March 1 as International Death Penalty Abolition Day.
The US as a whole remains one of the few remaining bastions of democratic support for the death penalty. One hundred and twenty nations have no capital punishment. No EU member executes its citizens, nor do our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. The UN has repeatedly endorsed an international moratorium on capital punishment.
There are some reasons for national optimism. In 2002 the US Supreme Court declared the execution of the mentally disabled unconstitutional; the execution of juveniles was abolished in 2005. Like Michigan, twelve states have no capital punishment statute; Illinois and New Jersey have moratoria in effect, and the death penalty laws of Kansas and New York have been nullified. Many mainstream religious institutions in the US oppose capital punishment as a violation of the right to life. Recent polls suggest that voters prefer life without parole as an alternative to the death penalty.
And just last week, after Michael Morales had exhausted all appeals for the murder of Terry Winchell a quarter century ago, and after he had been given his last meal in the “death watch cell,” two anesthesiologists had the moral courage to uphold the Hippocratic principle to do no harm. They refused to participate in Mr. Morales’ execution.
When that occurred, the prison bureaucracy still had 24 hours before the death warrant expired. Failing to find any credentialed health care professional to lend a hand, however, the state reluctantly called off the killing. Mr. Morales will live at least until May, when a hearing will be held in federal court to sort out the clinically Byzantine details of the oxymoron known as legal execution.
A society committed to nonviolence and human rights would not be a purveyor of capital punishment, nor would it be the world’s leader in per capita incarceration. Instead, such a society’s priorities would be to turn the swords of execution and torture into the ploughshares of preventative and rehabilitative social services.
March 1, International Death Penalty Abolition Day, is an appropriate time to rethink the Draconian strategies of our grotesquely ineffectual “war on crime.” As we contemplate our national prison population of 2.1 million souls and our current death row population of 3,373, let’s ask ourselves to all take seriously the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. Let’s all become healthcare providers of future generations, nurturers of the sanctity of human life, citizen healers who refuse to participate in any killing or gratuitous cruelty, even when authorized by the state.
David Howard is co-chair of Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions. [email protected]
