Mahony Urges End to Death Penalty

As Christians worldwide commemorated the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony called on Catholics on Friday to fight the death penalty.

At a news conference at the offices of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese, Mahony, who is chairman of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ Domestic Policy Committee, presented a statement calling for an end to capital punishment.

“On this Good Friday, a day when we recall our Savior’s own execution, we appeal to all people of goodwill, and especially Catholics, to work to end the death penalty,” said the statement by the 55-member administrative board of the U.S. Catholic Conference. “We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing.”

The church has fought the death penalty for more than 25 years, and the Good Friday statement came at a time of renewed focus on the issue by Mahony, several bishops and Pope John Paul II. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, there have been more than 530 executions nationwide and 3,549 inmates are currently on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

In California, 519 inmates are on death row.

“The numbers are deeply troubling. The pace of executions is numbing. The discovery of people on death row who are innocent is frightening,” the bishops’ statement said.

It also noted that “sadly, many Americans--including Catholics--still support the death penalty out of an understandable fear of crime. . . . We hope they will come to see, as we have, that more violence is not the answer.”

This is not the first time that Mahony has injected his voice into the death penalty debate. In February, he sent a letter to Gov. Gray Davis asking him to grant clemency to Jaturun Siripongs, who was convicted of the 1981 murders of a Garden Grove market owner and her clerk. Davis denied the request, and Siripongs became the sixth person executed in California since 1976.

Mahony made his plea less than a week after Pope John Paul II persuaded Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan to call off the execution of convicted triple murderer Darrell Mease.

Church teaching permits capital punishment, but the pope nonetheless has asked the U.S. government to abolish the practice. In a 1995 encyclical called “The Gospel of Life,” the pontiff wrote that instances in which execution is necessary to protect society have become “very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

One of the strongest statements against the death penalty came from Cardinal Bernard Law, who in arguing against restoring capital punishment in Massachusetts called the act “wrong, morally evil and a sin.”

In urging opposition to executions, Mahony reiterated his stand on two other social issues and exhorted Catholics to be “unconditionally pro-life.”

“We must defend not only innocent human life, as we do in opposing abortion and euthanasia, but the lives of those who may have done evil as well,” he said.