George Pitcher

George Pitcher reflects on the theology that underpins opposition to the death penalty and revisits a piece he wrote after becoming involved with an execution in Texas in 2003.

Someone said to me the other day that Reprieve, the human-rights charity that campaigns for people on Death Row, was an odd choice of cause to support during our Miserere Festival of Music & Drama during Lent. She said we might be more concerned about the victims of terrible murders, rather than their perpetrators. This made me reflect on my opposition, in all circumstances, to the death penalty - why, I wondered, do I feel capital punishment is inconsistent with Christian faith?

I've heard it said, not very seriously, that without capital punishment there wouldn't be a Christian faith. At the very heart of Christianity is the atonement - more specifically, a Roman crucifixion. And an unjust one at that. But I don't think we can buy that justification for a moment. It is surely because the innocent - some would say sinless - Jesus of Nazareth was tortured to death by an oppressive regime that no one else should be.

There is a school of classical atonement theology called "penal substitution", which argues inter alia that Jesus took the rap for human sin on the cross so that we don't have to. Like Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, who spoke out against penal substitution on the BBC during Holy Week, I find that unacceptable at all sorts of levels, my principal objection being that it casts God as some sort of cosmic child abuser, demanding the sacrifice of an innocent - and his son at that - as a pay-off to appease his wrath. I see no evidence that a loving creator God, who participates in human suffering, can be like that.

If God meets the suffering of his creation in the horror of the Cross, then we are enjoined to meet the divine in our worldly existence through putting an end to such cruelties. In the programme notes for the Miserere Festival for Reprieve I wrote: An innocent person summarily arrested, beaten and condemned to death by an oppressive government that just wants one more opponent executed and out of the way. The victim is abandoned by all but a few friends and family. No one of any influence to offer representation. No justice. No hope. Sound familiar?

But what of the guilty? Don't they deserve what they get on Death Row? Well, it seems to me that Jesus of Nazareth spent his time among the marginalised and most revolting, telling them they were forgiven. He offered hope; capital punishment offers none. And even the proponents of penal substitution would accept that he, in innocence, died a horrible death so that murderers and rapists wouldn't have to.

So I can't see a gospel in the death penalty. I think it's holy to campaign against it. And I reproduce here a piece I wrote the morning after a British subject, Jackie Elliott, was executed by the State of Texas in February, 2003. It was the event that made me realise I could never countenance judicial murder - for that is what it is. It is a piece written in a different world, before the Iraq war, and it was written in anger. I'm sorry about that. We should try to remain even-tempered. But these were my views on the death penalty that morning and they are my views now.

The Execution of Jackie Elliott, 4th February 2003

There are moments when it's easier to forgive your enemies than your friends; times when you hold your allies in greater contempt than those who are meant to be a threat to your life. Such a moment came for me a little after midnight in the bitter cold of last Wednesday morning outside Westminster Abbey, where a clutch of human rights lawyers and campaigners held a final and all but hopeless vigil for John "Jackie" Elliott, a 42-year-old British subject who was about to be poisoned to death by the State of Texas. It was, for me, the moment that at last my relationship with our great friend America, with whom we stand shoulder to shoulder, became personal and bitter.

Elliott had been on Death Row for 16 years, after his conviction for his alleged part in the gang-rape and murder of teenage single mother Joyce Munguia in 1986. He was born and raised for part of his childhood in Felixstowe, Suffolk, before the family moved to Texas, which explains the unprecedented support for clemency that he received from British and other European authorities - 150 MPs, the President of the EU, church leaders including the Archbishop of Westminster and the Bishop of London, members of the House of Lords, the Law Society and the English Bar's Human Rights Committee. Felixstowe's MP, John Gummer, flew to Texas to plead with Governor Rick Perry.

British lawyers who had taken up Jackie's case claim that his conviction would have been deeply unsafe under UK law. Key evidence was never tested using modern DNA methodologies that are used as a matter of course in Britain and could finally have refuted already dodgy testimony against Jackie. The main prosecution witness at Jackie's trial was also the other main suspect and it was this witness's motorcycle chain that was used as the murder weapon, not Jackie's. This witness was a member of "The Motorcycle Gang" - so-named for brutally obvious reasons - while Jackie was not.

Jackie was convicted on evidence from a forensic expert subsequently exposed as a fraud. The court-appointed lawyer who conducted Jackie's defence was better known for taxation cases and had never conducted a capital case before - he has subsequently conceded that he was too inexperienced to represent Jackie properly. The original jury all agreed that there should be a stay of execution in order to review the case.

But, in the end, it was not the lack of justice from the legal cowboys of the Texan judiciary system that proved the most nauseating aspect of Elliott's case - nor the absurd disregard for any degree of rehabilitation over the long 16 years facing execution - so much as the casual cruelties and ugly prejudices that were meted out to him in his final days. In the cold night of Parliament Square, hard by where our Government will seek its mandate to go to war alongside America, it is these nasty little cruelties and prejudices directed at one wretched British subject on Death Row that, close up and personal, enabled me to see through the sham of the self-appointment of the United States as arbiter of world peace and global moral guardian. Or maybe it was just the cold of Parliament Square. Judge for yourself.

In the week before Jackie was due to be executed, the lawyer presiding over Jackie's final appeals process, Judge Jon Wisser, wrote to the Board of Pardons & Parole to remark that "I have not had contact with any defendant more deserving of the ultimate penalty than Mr Elliott". This might be presumed to be a considered indictment from a learned judge. Except that Judge Wisser, in his wisdom, had unusually chosen to deliver himself of his opinion before reviewing the evidence before him.

Lawyers for Jackie had no difficulty in having the eccentric Judge Wisser removed from overseeing Jackie's final appeal. They are in possession of an email that Wisser subsequently wrote to the District Attorney: "Sorry about the letter," he writes gaily, "but a judge is in a 'tough' position when the parole board makes a specific request for your opinion." Not, perhaps, as tough a position as Jackie Elliott found himself in. But then comes perhaps Wisser's most revoltingly facetious remark: "Ironically, just today I finally read the defense DNA motions and felt there might be merit to them." We are privileged to know that the Judge eventually looked at the evidence.

We don't know how easily Judge Wisser slept that night, but Jackie's lawyer - the noble Clive Stafford Smith - wrote to Governor Rick Perry to point out the implications of Wisser's prejudice: "Ironically enough, had Judge Wisser waited to hear the evidence before giving his final opinion, he would probably have ordered the very DNA testing that I'm asking for." Almost on his knees, as a rare lawyer brought up to a sense of civilised justice, Stafford Smith concluded: "All I am asking for, on Mr Elliott's behalf, is that we do not prejudge the case. Please, Governor, set the example to us all, so that there might be a little less irony and a little more justice."

On the day scheduled or Jackie's execution, Wisser's replacement, Judge Campbell, became untraceable to the appellants. He was, apparently, somewhere in Dallas. A few hours before the execution, the DA's office released over 50 documents relating to Jackie's case, but allowed no stay of execution to enable Jackie's defence team to review them. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that backs were being covered in anticipation of a subsequent claim that evidence was withheld from the defence - however cursory that opportunity might turn out to be. And so the grim realisation grew that nothing was going to alter Jackie's fate - soon after 7pm in Texas, Jackie was strapped to a table and injected with drugs that collapsed his heart and lungs. In the end, Jackie died only because Texas, the home of George W. Bush, wanted him to.

It's impossible to conceive that evidence in the Joyce Munguia case will ever be DNA-tested to establish who really murdered her. The State of Texas wouldn't see the point, now that it has executed someone for the crime. But that would hardly seem to be a satisfactory solution for the allegedly civilised western world, the European end of which campaigns for an end to capital punishment, partly to enable proof of guilt to be overturned by evidence of innocence whenever it comes to light and before it's too late.

Jackie looked to us, in the country of his birth, to make our position clear, not just on the legal cavities of his own case, but on US capital punishment in general. It has to be said that the British Government has done so consistently. Last July, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw promised after he had held talks with the Death Penalty Panel about how best to target its work geographically and thematically that "these discussions will be continued at working level to ensure maximum impact of our strategy worldwide." The UK had recently reinforced its abolitionist stance by signing Protocol 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, banning the death penalty in all circumstances, including time of war. Mr Straw added: "We will continue to work tirelessly towards worldwide abolition of the death penalty."

Similarly, Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain welcomed the adoption of the European Union's resolution on the death penalty at the Commission on Human Rights with these words: "The resolution on the death penalty will remain a central issue in Britain's human rights policy. We urge the end of capital punishment in law and in practice."

Such remonstrations from the British Government cut no ice with American lynch-mobs. Last year, Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman assured lawyers representing another British national on Death Row in the State of Georgia, the severely brain-damaged Tracy Housel, that "we have been in regular contact at consular level with the relevant authorities in the US...we have made clear consistently throughout the process that we oppose the death penalty." Georgia went ahead and executed Housel anyway.

That's some special relationship that Blair has with George W. Bush. If it makes no difference in US trade wars with Europe, why should it make any difference with a human rights agenda? Blair didn't raise Elliott's case with Bush when he visited him four days before the execution date. Number Ten's line was that Elliott's plight was "a state, not a federal, issue." There were, in any event, more glamorous global issues to discuss than the fate of one British citizen on Death Row.

There were glimmers of hope before Elliott was put to death. The New Year brought news that the Republican Governor of Illinois, George Ryan, had announced on his retirement that he was commuting the death sentences on all the 167 prisoners facing execution in his state. He described capital punishment as a "catastrophic failure" and added that the system was "haunted by the demon of error - error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die."

He could, of course, have been talking about Jackie Elliott. But way down south Texas way they see these matters rather differently. Texas is far and away the most enthusiastic judicial murderer in the US, having put to death 295 men, women and (really) children. And that's another point that's worth reminding ourselves about as we coat-tail Bush into war - the United States aren't united at all. They are a loose federation of judiciaries that can largely do as they like - such as killing our citizens, without objection from our Prime Minister to their President, because it's not "a federal matter".

Just before Texas killed Jackie, Gummer walked across from his home in nearby Queen Anne's Gate with his family to join the vigil. As they connected Jackie to the lethal drugs, Gummer gathered the small, shivering crowd around the candles in jam jars and announced he would say a little prayer. He told us he would do this in the manner he knows, in the Christian way, but invited anyone from a different faith to offer up prayers as they wished. My mind turned to the deeply Christian Bush and Blair and the rumours that they pray together. At least one of them believed that Jackie Elliott deserved to die that night. No doubt both would confirm that the Christian thing to do would be to pray not just for Jackie but for his executioners. Conversely, It would be abominably unchristian to hope that those who so casually put him to death rot in hell. But, God, it's hard sometimes.