Death penalty opponents put 'Jesus on Trial': Jarvis DeBerry
Damon Thibodeaux is embraced by Derrick James, himself a former death row inmate, following a press conference at Resurrection After Exoneration headquarters on St. Bernard Avenue. Thibodeaux was released from Angola September 28, 2012, after being exonerated in the 1996 rape and murder of 14-year-old Crystal Champagne under the Huey P. Long Bridge. (Staff Photo by Michael DeMocker) (Michael DeMocker / NOLA.COM | The Times-Picayune)
In a Loyola Law School mock trial gaveled to order by real-life U.S. District Judge Helen "Ginger" Berrigan Friday, prosecutors asked jurors to execute a certain Jesus of Nazareth for blasphemous acts they say were both heinous and responsible for leading multitudes of people astray. The itinerant preacher's defense lawyers argued that he shouldn't be executed, that nobody ever should, but the state said there remained a threat to the public.
Friday's "Jesus on Trial" demonstration was organized in part by the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University, which makes no secret of its opposition to the death penalty. In a pamphlet distributed before the trial called "Diminishing All of Us: The Death Penalty in Louisiana," the JSRI notes that "Louisiana has one of the highest wrongful-conviction rates in the country. More people have been exonerated in Louisiana in the last ten years than executed."
Challenging the notion that the death penalty is reserved for the "worst of the worst," the group says execution is actually visited upon "the least among us." On Louisiana's death row, there's an overrepresentation of people with childhood trauma, people who were younger than 21 at the time of the crime and people with intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses.
Louisiana, JSRI says, "leads the nation in the percentage of death row inmates who are African-American" and "cases involving white victims are disproportionately targeted for the death penalty by our elected district attorneys." And it references a 2005 pastoral letter from the U.S. Catholic Bishops, Pope John Paul II's encyclical "The Gospel of Life" and statements from Pope Benedict XVI, all of which express opposition to executions.
Still, putting Jesus on trial seemed at first a cutesy gimmick, unlikely to persuade the stalwart who believes the worst among us should be irreversibly removed from the rest of us. But there was something about Osler's presentation, the way he relentlessly pressed his case against the defendant that made me glad I wasn't on a jury. Because I may have voted for death.
That's not because I'm a death penalty supporter. I'm not. But if I had sworn to follow the law and heard a prosecutor making a case like this one was, what could I have done but vote for death?
And that, it occurred to me, was the point of the exercise. Many of us revere the law more than we revere life itself. We don't let our consciences interfere when authorities point out what's written on the books. We go along with things we feel are wrong because we're told that what we feel is irrelevant.
After the trial, the audience broke off into five different juries. Some found there were no aggravating circumstances that warranted death. Others found that whatever aggravating circumstances existed were outweighed by mitigating factors. Consequently, all five juries voted for life imprisonment.
"It's unanimous for life imprisonment," Judge Berrigan said after reading the jury forms. She exhaled and nodded. "Jesus, you're OK."
"Jesus on Trial" is not a play. The prosecutors and defense attorneys have assigned roles. But they're trying to win an argument, not working from a script. After the verdicts were read Osler told the room that the mock trial is "very hard for me. It sets the prosecutor against the Christian." But he is deliberate about the people he wants to persuade. "The death penalty would not exist in the United States without Christian support. Christian support for the death penalty keeps the death penalty going."
Testifying in Jesus' defense was a woman who said she would have been stoned for adultery if not for the defendant's intervention. He silenced her accusers, she said, by urging the sinless one among them to throw the first stone. Nobody did.
Bishop said that response should also silence folks who think executions are fine so long as a defendant's guilt is certain. "He doesn't say she doesn't deserve to die," Bishop said. "He says you don't deserve to kill her."
"What jail? What prison can hold a man who can walk on water?" asked Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor who teaches law at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
No one is beyond the purpose of God. Then how can we have a death penalty?" -- Jeanne Bishop arguing against the government's plan to execute Jesus
Jeanne Bishop, a Chicago public defender who lost a sister, brother-in-law and their unborn child to murder, said her client's embrace of society's rejects - tax collectors, lepers, bleeding women, non-bleeding women - reveals a startling theology: "No one is beyond the redemption of God. No one is beyond the purpose of God. Then how can we have a death penalty?"Friday's "Jesus on Trial" demonstration was organized in part by the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University, which makes no secret of its opposition to the death penalty. In a pamphlet distributed before the trial called "Diminishing All of Us: The Death Penalty in Louisiana," the JSRI notes that "Louisiana has one of the highest wrongful-conviction rates in the country. More people have been exonerated in Louisiana in the last ten years than executed."
Challenging the notion that the death penalty is reserved for the "worst of the worst," the group says execution is actually visited upon "the least among us." On Louisiana's death row, there's an overrepresentation of people with childhood trauma, people who were younger than 21 at the time of the crime and people with intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses.
Louisiana, JSRI says, "leads the nation in the percentage of death row inmates who are African-American" and "cases involving white victims are disproportionately targeted for the death penalty by our elected district attorneys." And it references a 2005 pastoral letter from the U.S. Catholic Bishops, Pope John Paul II's encyclical "The Gospel of Life" and statements from Pope Benedict XVI, all of which express opposition to executions.
Still, putting Jesus on trial seemed at first a cutesy gimmick, unlikely to persuade the stalwart who believes the worst among us should be irreversibly removed from the rest of us. But there was something about Osler's presentation, the way he relentlessly pressed his case against the defendant that made me glad I wasn't on a jury. Because I may have voted for death.
That's not because I'm a death penalty supporter. I'm not. But if I had sworn to follow the law and heard a prosecutor making a case like this one was, what could I have done but vote for death?
And that, it occurred to me, was the point of the exercise. Many of us revere the law more than we revere life itself. We don't let our consciences interfere when authorities point out what's written on the books. We go along with things we feel are wrong because we're told that what we feel is irrelevant.
After the trial, the audience broke off into five different juries. Some found there were no aggravating circumstances that warranted death. Others found that whatever aggravating circumstances existed were outweighed by mitigating factors. Consequently, all five juries voted for life imprisonment.
"It's unanimous for life imprisonment," Judge Berrigan said after reading the jury forms. She exhaled and nodded. "Jesus, you're OK."
"Jesus on Trial" is not a play. The prosecutors and defense attorneys have assigned roles. But they're trying to win an argument, not working from a script. After the verdicts were read Osler told the room that the mock trial is "very hard for me. It sets the prosecutor against the Christian." But he is deliberate about the people he wants to persuade. "The death penalty would not exist in the United States without Christian support. Christian support for the death penalty keeps the death penalty going."
Testifying in Jesus' defense was a woman who said she would have been stoned for adultery if not for the defendant's intervention. He silenced her accusers, she said, by urging the sinless one among them to throw the first stone. Nobody did.
Bishop said that response should also silence folks who think executions are fine so long as a defendant's guilt is certain. "He doesn't say she doesn't deserve to die," Bishop said. "He says you don't deserve to kill her."
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