Trap doors

Twenty-five years ago, I was finishing up a one-year volunteer clergy internship at the Old St. Louis City Jail. Situated at 14th and Clark streets downtown, the location is now a parking lot for a hockey arena, the Scottrade Center. It was a maximum-security facility and quite dated. The chaplains were patted down as we entered the lockup, which -- while necessary -- was to my recollection a somewhat humiliating experience.

The sixth floor had metal loops in the ceiling; directly below them were trap doors welded shut. Before the state of Missouri took over executions many decades ago, cities held the power to put men to death -- and those loops and doors were reminders of who held the power. I stood on those doors and reflected on the men who had been hanged on that very spot.

We volunteer clergy worked with the permanent chaplain, Paul Beins, a remarkable and competent Lutheran cleric with incredibly salty language.

Beins got very direct with each of us volunteer chaplains on our first night of training: "If you're for the death penalty, tell me now, because if you believe men ought to be put to death by the state, you're not going anywhere near the cellblock."

I'll confess, back then I was a little ambivalent about capital punishment. I am no longer.

What got me off the fence was former Illinois governor George Ryan's long-ago decision, unpopular with the public, to place a moratorium on state-sponsored execution. Reason? The reversal of several death-row cases in the Land of Lincoln.

If even one man (or woman) is put to death for a crime he or she did not do, the number is too high. So believed Ryan, and so do I.

You might say to me that there were plenty of executions in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament.

I teach that subject at Southeast Missouri State University. I am aware of this.

Allow me to say that context is important. When Israel first received the Law of Moses, commandment No. 6, "Thou shalt not kill" (or murder, depending on your point of view), was a prohibition to stop the wandering band of ex-slaves from resolving disputes through ending the life of an adversary. Yet people were put to death -- regularly.

Roman Catholic Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., gave a remarkably lucid answer to this obvious disconnect.

Wuerl says there was no other legitimate way, other than death, to separate a wrongdoer from the general population.

Everybody moved together; there were no mobile jails. There was simply no place to incarcerate the offender because Israel was continually on the move across the wilderness.

Today, of course, we have options. We have permanent jails and prisons and penitentiaries. Ancient Israel, unlike contemporary America, had no options.

Pope Francis the other day called for a one-year moratorium on the death penalty. I support that. I know many will not.

Many believe state-sponsored executions are a deterrent, that they will make a person think twice about committing the ultimate violent act.

Sounds reasonable, except that murder is often -- not always -- a decision made in the moment, without reflection, without thinking through what will happen.

I remember talking with many a young man behind the cellblock for whom murder was a crime of passion. Consequences often do not occur to people who act out sudden murderous impulses. People I love and respect feel quite differently, and while I honor their thinking, I cannot agree for the reasons mentioned above.