Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Right/Rite to Death: Part II
22 Plays2 years ago
In today's episode of Interactions, we’re going to talk about the r-i-t-e rite to death—the religious rites and rituals that accompany death, made particularly salient in death row cases. For this, we’ll be looking at the case of Ramirez v. Collier.
In this case, John Ramirez, a Texas death row inmate, requested that he be permitted to have his pastor present at his execution, pray over him and lay hands on him. But Texas denied the request, and the case went to the Supreme Court. The question became whether Texas’s denial represented a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and a violation of RLUIPA. In this interview, we ask the question: What rights do religious inmates have on death row?
In this second episode of our two-part series, we talk to Peter Wosnik, the owner and founder of Wosnik Law, LLC, which is a trial-based law firm serving the Metro Atlanta area. Wosnik is also a graduate of Emory University School of Law (Juris Doctor) and Candler School of Theology (Master of Theological Studies), where he received the Savage-Levey scholarship in law and religion.
Listen now.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: Law, Religion, and Death Row
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Interactions, a podcast about law and religion and how they interact in the world around us. I'm Anna Knudsen. And I'm Ethan Anthony.
Choice of Execution Methods: Nance's Case
00:00:16
Speaker
And for this two-part episode, we had the pleasure of speaking to Peter Woznik and Daniel the Chance about two death row cases relevant to law and religion.
00:00:26
Speaker
In this first episode of 2, we want to talk about prisoners on death row and the R-I-G-H-T right to death. The right, if there is one, for death row inmates to have a say in deciding the way in which they die. For this, we're going to be looking at the case of Michael Nance, a death row inmate who requested death by firing squad in the state of Georgia. By current law, death row inmates are allowed to contest the means of execution, which currently is by lethal injection.
Religious Rights and Execution: Ramirez's Request
00:00:52
Speaker
but to do so, they have to come up with the alternative means of execution themselves. We'll be getting into relevant cases like Glossip v Gross, how retributive justice unfolds in American prisons, and discussing the ethics of what happens when the burden falls on the prisoner to decide the way they die. In our second episode, we're going to talk about the RITE right to death, the religious rights and rituals that accompany death made particularly salient in death row cases.
00:01:22
Speaker
For this, we'll be looking at the case of Ramirez V. Collier. In this case, John Ramirez, a Texas death row inmate, requested that he be permitted to have his pasture present at his execution, and to pray over him and lay hands on him. But Texas denied the request, and the case went to the Supreme Court. The question became whether Texas' denial represented a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, and a violation of R. Lupa.
00:01:48
Speaker
In this interview, we ask the question, what rights do religious inmates have on death row?
Interview: Peter Woznik on Inmate Dignity
00:01:54
Speaker
You're listening to Interactions, and this is The Right to Death.
00:02:04
Speaker
Peter Woznik is the owner and founder of Woznik Law LLC, which is a trial-based law firm serving the Metro Atlanta area. Woznik is a graduate of Emory University School of Law and Candler School of Theology, where he received the Savage-Levy Scholarship in Law and Religion. This is our interview with Peter Woznik.
00:02:27
Speaker
I wanted to start, I was speaking with Daniel Lachance. I don't know if you know him. He's an Emory University Law and History professor here, and he was talking about how the death penalty claims that we're seeing now are about having a level of dignity
00:02:42
Speaker
restored to the prisoners or the inmates on death row rather than challenging the death itself. And I thought that that was pretty telling, given Ramirez V. Collier, the case that we're talking about today, because he isn't requesting to not be executed, right? He's requesting
00:03:01
Speaker
how he's being executed.
Case Overview: Ramirez v. Collier
00:03:03
Speaker
He's requesting a religious right. And so I was wondering if you could speak to us about Ramirez's request here. What is it that he's requesting and what are the stakes to his claim? What were the stakes, I would say? Yeah. So as you all know, the court recently ruled on this issue and Ramirez would call your end
00:03:27
Speaker
They found that Ramirez was likely to succeed on his claim under Arlupa. And basically that they found that he had a sincere religious belief or claim to have physical touch that is laying on of hands.
00:03:48
Speaker
and vocal prayer during his execution in the execution chamber and that because he had this sincere belief that Texas denying him the right to those things substantially burdened his religious free exercise under the Arlupa statute and
Religious Accommodations and State Challenges
00:04:10
Speaker
Additionally, they could have denied this right, but they had to find, they had to show that there was no least or less restrictive alternative that they could have offered. And the court found that just a general blanket bar to his claims was not sufficient. And essentially they found that you could have, or rather that the state could have
00:04:36
Speaker
accommodated his requests in various ways that would have still, on the one hand, recognized or validated Texas's compelling government interest, which the court found that there was a compelling government interest while also protecting Mr. Ramirez's sincere religious belief or sincere religious claim. This sounds like our loop. Can you tell me a little bit about how that functions here?
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah, so our loop is an acronym for the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. And essentially is practiced over about 20 years ago, signed into law by President Clinton. And essentially it grants, among other things, people who are institutionalized prisoners, essentially religious freedom claim by statute, and
00:05:32
Speaker
Once an individual can show that they have a sincere religious belief or claim that's being burdened, the burden then shifts to the state or the institution to show that there's no less restrictive alternative and to go ahead and accommodate the religious practice in question.
00:05:55
Speaker
I remember we were speaking about this last week. The fact that the burden of the claim was on Ramirez and not on the state. Can you tell me a little bit about that? So the court mentioned that Texas did not present a less restrictive alternative and it suggested that it was actually Ramirez's burden.
00:06:18
Speaker
to suggest to come up with the least restrictive alternative. The court said that that gets the analysis backwards, basically. That sounds a bit out of left field to me where it's like, why would it be Ramirez's job to come up with the less restrictive means? That sounds like the state's job to me. Right. I think it certainly is the state's job to accommodate
00:06:47
Speaker
prisoners and to come up with a way that they can, in this case, carry out the execution and do it in a way that still protects their interests in an orderly and safe execution. The Supreme Court gave several examples of things that could be done to make sure that the execution goes forward.
00:07:16
Speaker
like in an orderly and safe fashion. But instead of coming up with some solution like that, Texas just, you know, borrowed all laying on his hands and all religious prayer. One example that comes to mind is the court saying that maybe, you know, he could have touched the
00:07:39
Speaker
prisoner kind of on a different part of his body. Yeah. Yeah. I remember the quote is something like, are we going to have to go through every single part of the body and decide which part is okay and which isn't like it got to this absurd capacity. Right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So, so for religious touch, you know, the court brought up allowing touch on a part of the body away from the IV lines.
00:08:03
Speaker
such as a prisoner's lower leg that they could require Ramirez to stand in a location that gives the medical team like a good view of the IV lines and to be able to watch problems and quickly respond and restrict the time period during which touching is permitted to minimize risk.
00:08:26
Speaker
Right. So the point here is that there were other ways that the state could have accommodated his claim and they weren't doing
Historical Context: Clergy in Executions
00:08:32
Speaker
so. Is it clear why Texas wasn't doing so? Like what was their like motive? Do you know the motive that they had for saying we're going just to just like point blank, not allow anybody to have any sort of religious person in the chamber? So in this case, they were going to allow them to be in the chamber. Right.
00:08:54
Speaker
Um, because the court had already ruled previously that, that basically you have to allow a person, spiritual advisor, clergy member to be present in a chamber. But this case extended the question to whether laying on a pants, physical touch.
00:09:11
Speaker
or audible prayer could be allowed. And I think a lot of these cases kind of have their genesis with prohibiting minority religions to be able to have their spiritual advisor present.
00:09:28
Speaker
if you look kind of back at the line of cases, because essentially there's a long history in the country and the court noted this of spiritual advisors or clergy persons being present during executions, offering prayers, giving guidance, that type of a thing. And then there were basically a string of cases
00:09:55
Speaker
One of them was in Alabama and another one was in Texas. The Alabama case basically dealt with an Islamic individual who wanted his imam to be present. The court actually didn't intervene in that case. And that, that individual, Dominic Reyes was, I believe his name was executed without being able to have his imam present.
00:10:21
Speaker
Not long thereafter in Texas, an individual who was Buddhist wanted his advisor be present. And it was in that case that the court intervened and said that basically you can't allow Christians basically to have their spiritual advisor to be present, but then not allow other religions like Buddhist people or Islamic people
00:10:50
Speaker
to have their spiritual advisor present. So that basically changed things. But then Texas's response was then to say, all right, well, we're not going to allow any clergy people to be present during execution, which then the court responded again in a later case and said that, no, that actually that's not okay, because there is a right to have your clergy person present.
Judicial Perspectives on Religious Sincerity
00:11:15
Speaker
So that brings us up to Ramirez B. Collier, where
00:11:19
Speaker
It wasn't in question whether a person's spiritual advisor or clergy person could be present. But now to this question of whether there could be audible prayer and religious touching or laying on of hands. So you do think that there's a pattern of discrimination in the way these cases are being decided? I think it's pretty clear in
00:11:47
Speaker
these cases that there was less of a desire to want to extend these kind of traditional rights to having a clergy person present to minority religions or non-Christian religions.
00:12:05
Speaker
because historically, again, this is something that was very common. And even in the Ramirez case, and this is really, I think one of the most compelling facts in the Ramirez case, and that wasn't disputed, was that Texas had a history of allowing clergy persons in the chamber and allowing physical touch and audible prayer, right? And then all of a sudden, they're not allowing it. And so this really kind of hurt
00:12:35
Speaker
Texas's claim that they had no way of accommodating Mr. Ramirez's religious claim or request, right? Because it's like a basic precedent. Yeah, like if they'd done it in the past and there hasn't been a problem, then why all of a sudden is this causing a problem? And so I think that fact alone probably went quite a bit into the court's thinking. On the other hand,
00:13:03
Speaker
lower courts didn't necessarily question Mr. Ramirez's sincerity of his claim. That wasn't really in question. Okay. And that wasn't really the argument that Texas was going up against with a lot of vigor. However, just this Thomas and his dissent, he wasn't buying it. He just, he saw
00:13:28
Speaker
you know, Mr. Ramirez's claims as being an attempt to essentially gain the system, which is in the oral argument, something that he was very concerned about. And then that came out in his dissent that he thought that Ramirez was using religion as a tactic of delay. And his argument was that Mr. Ramirez had been trying to
00:13:58
Speaker
essentially delay the process since the very beginning that he absconded at the beginning when they finally tried to been convicted.
00:14:06
Speaker
that convicted him that he's been fighting, taking responsibility essentially since the very beginning. I'm curious about that dissent because how much does the sincerity of Ramirez's claim ultimately matter? Like I know when we talk about a faith practice, it's all about your personal belief, right? But there's also the fact that maybe there is this constitutional right to having someone spiritual present in the chamber with you. And so regardless of whether your
00:14:31
Speaker
your actual claim is sincere, the next person down the line who's going to have their case decided on the precedent of Ramirez could be sincere regardless. So does the court have some sort of responsibility to that future person regardless of Ramirez's sincerity?
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think it just goes into whether it substantially burdens their pre-exercise of religion, right? So if someone's claim isn't sincere at all, then it's hard to say that it's a substantial burden on their religious free exercise. But on the other hand, if it's an important, sincere religious belief that a person has,
00:15:12
Speaker
and it's being infringed by a state policy, then it's much easier to make out that it's substantially burdening somebody's religious free exercise. That makes sense. Yeah. I think another one of my questions was like, what are the stakes for this decision? Right. So Ramirez has been granted the right to have someone in the execution chamber, or they're going to decide in his favor.
00:15:37
Speaker
I think this might tie into the question of what future cases could come down the pipeline, right, that are going to be decided on this, what is the importance of this case, do you think for like religious freedom claims for just the Supreme Court in general, like, what are the stakes.
00:15:54
Speaker
I think that's a good question. I think this case demonstrated that the court is probably likely to give the benefit of the doubt to the religious claimant about their sincerity, right? The majority noted in its opinion that there probably were some reasons to doubt Mr. Ramirez's sincerity, primarily because he had initially
00:16:22
Speaker
issued a request saying that he wasn't going to need religious touch or vocal prayer, but that he was just going to need his clergy person present. And then he withdrew that request and then submitted another one later. The majority didn't think that that was
00:16:40
Speaker
a big enough problem to cast doubt on his sincerity. For Justice Thomas, it was a big problem and cast a lot of doubt on Mr. Ramirez's sincerity. To answer your general question though, I think this opinion shows that the court is going to take
00:17:06
Speaker
religious free exercise claims seriously. It's going to take our Lupa claims seriously. And it's going to put quite a bit of pressure on the state, in this case, Texas, right from, or put pressure on them to come up with reasonable accommodations and not let the state put the burden for a least restrictive alternative on the prisoner, right?
00:17:34
Speaker
is going to put the burden on or keep the burden where it should be on the state or on the prison to come up with some kind of reasonable accommodation. So I think that's one of the takeaways that something like this is serious to the court. I think one of the kind of like unspoken facts in the background that probably helped persuade the court if I'm
00:18:02
Speaker
kind of speculating intervention, I guess, is that, yeah, is that this historic practice, right? That this request of Ramirez isn't some newfangled kind of off the wall thing that he wanted, right? Like, I mean, this practice of clergy presence at execution goes back to the founding and even before. And the Beckett Fund did an amicus brief
00:18:31
Speaker
of detailing that history. And the court talked about this history in the opinion, and I think talked about this rich, rich history, right, of having a clergy present. And we may have talked about this in a prior conversation, but, you know, religion often
00:18:57
Speaker
comes into play in people's lives in moments where there's a lot of meaning or where really important things are happening, right? Like at birth, at marriage, at death, kind of these moments of, I guess, threshold moments or moments of moving from one
00:19:20
Speaker
one place to another or moving on from one area in life to another in life. And there's perhaps no more important transition from life to death. And so to think that a person might have an interest in having a religious function at that time is totally understandable. And so I think that's part of the reason why the court was so sympathetic
00:19:50
Speaker
to this claim. And then the second piece is just that there were so many possible accommodations that Texas could have come up with and didn't write and didn't offer that I think it made it an easier case for the court to decide it, you know, with an eight one majority instead of like a closer five four decision.
Faith in Prison and Execution Morality
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:11
Speaker
But I think Justice Thomas's dissent kind of shows that, yeah, there might have been some reasons to doubt the sincerity of Mr. Ramirez's claims, which I think, you know, his point is pretty well taken. But to the majority, that doubt wasn't enough to make them obviously side with Justice Thomas in saying that his claim shouldn't have been or that he wasn't likely to prevail on this claim. Right.
00:20:40
Speaker
I think relatedly, I was curious about what you were saying about times of meaning and threshold spaces. I'm curious about the sheer length of time that a prisoner spends on average on death row. I think the average was 17 years. And since death row inmates spend so much time on death row, it seems cases like Ramirez's are going to become maybe more common because
00:21:07
Speaker
These prisoners have a lot of time to adopt a faith practice and to practice their faith. So I feel like these questions might be becoming more pressing because people are living like entire lifetimes on death row, it seems, and these moments of meaning become more and more common. Yeah, I think that's a great point that you bring up. I mean,
00:21:31
Speaker
A lot of these individuals, like you said, have been incarcerated for a very long time. Yeah, I think at least kind of in my own experience as a criminal defense attorney, people often seem to find God or to want to approach God or the divine in very stressful time in their lives. And it's hard to think of something more stressful, difficult, or dramatic than being incarcerated, right?
00:22:00
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it's surprising at all that you have prisoners who are bringing religious free exercise claims because I think they have a strong incentive to approach the divine because they are in such a difficult place in their lives, removed from their families, removed from their communities, restricted in what they can do, restricted in
00:22:30
Speaker
who they can contact and how they can contact them, you know, being removed from being able to see their children grow normally and be involved in their families and communities and otherwise. So no, I think that's certainly something that would come up. And I think religious leaders in the past who have undergone trials, right, or experience with the criminal justice system, you know,
00:22:59
Speaker
Martin Luther King being held in jail, and you have the letters, I believe, from the Birmingham jail, if I'm recalling those correctly. In my own tradition, I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormons or the LDS faith, some of the most inspiring texts in, arguably, that Joseph Smith produced, he produced when he was incarcerated in Missouri.
00:23:30
Speaker
And then, you know, you think of Christianity generally in the trial of trial and execution of Jesus. So yeah, I do think that kind of contact with the criminal justice system, incarceration, all those things can easily lead to or evoke religious sentiments and religious feelings. Yeah. And provide a space for a prisoner to exercise autonomy or to want to make those kinds of choices or free exercise claims.
00:24:01
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I think this is kind of what we said earlier, but these cases such as Ramirez v. Collier are trying to determine whether a prisoner has a right to determine how they die, not whether they die.
Legal and Moral Implications for Jurors
00:24:14
Speaker
And some of the other cases we're looking at for this episode have been the recent slew of firing squad cases where
00:24:22
Speaker
you're, again, trying to determine a right in how you die. And I remember you've done some research on reasonable doubt, and I was curious about firing squad executions and how that relates to your research on reasonable doubt. It'd be interesting to bring that up. Or just, I remember it had to do with the morality of the jury, like deciding who is the person responsible for deciding.
00:24:47
Speaker
And how does that responsibility get played out in a legal setting? Yeah, so I had read in my research, a book by a professor at Yale, Professor Whitman, he's got a book on kind of the theological roots and the origins of a reasonable doubt and one of the kind of surprising and
00:25:14
Speaker
interesting ideas that he uncovers is that Reasonable Doubt has this long kind of theological history and he argues that the idea and concept of Reasonable Doubt was developed not to protect the accused, as we would normally think, but actually to protect the conscience of the jurors
00:25:38
Speaker
And to be able to allow them to convict individuals accused of crimes and then I guess not feel the same amount of moral weight. And so one of the things that he talks about that
00:25:54
Speaker
hard for a lot of modern folks to understand is just how much pressure medieval jurors felt with convicting somebody. They took really serious the biblical command to judge not and they felt that if they judged incorrectly that their eternal soul was in jeopardy.
00:26:17
Speaker
And that, you know, to put it more bluntly that they could go to hell if they falsely convicted somebody. So theologians developed this idea of reasonable doubt in order to kind of assuage or calm the conscience of jurors. And I think that just kind of gets to the idea of, you know, how serious it is to condemn somebody, right? To death or to convict somebody of a crime otherwise, and
00:26:47
Speaker
in our system of the jury trial, it's sort of a collective conviction, right? At least in Georgia, where I practice the jury conviction requires the unanimous verdict. Everybody's got to be involved in it. And yeah, I think that that kind of beckons to this ancient idea of moral,
00:27:17
Speaker
guilt or to provide jurors with, with moral comfort because they were doing this terrible awesome act. And his call kind of at the end of the book is to revive this original meaning of reasonable doubt that, you know, jurors aren't just doing some kind of technical, you know, finding a fact. I guess they are in a certain sense, but if according to Whitman,
00:27:45
Speaker
historical background of what they're doing is something that carries a lot of moral weight.
00:27:51
Speaker
Is it possible that the move that some prisoners are making to request firing squad over lethal injection? I mean, lethal injection seems so aesthetic. It's so cosmetic. You don't have to face the same moral decision because, I mean, it just looks like a vaccine,
Religious Freedom, Rehabilitation, and Redemption
00:28:10
Speaker
whereas the bloodiness of firing squad, I wonder if there's a connection there, whether the reasonable doubt standard might apply. Yeah.
00:28:21
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think there's a sense in which things have been sort of sanitized over time, right? We have more distance from the kind of dirty work, if you will, of the criminal justice system than we used to have. I'm just thinking out loud in the community I live in, there was a move to put the jail right next to the courthouse, which was by a neighborhood.
00:28:49
Speaker
And there was kind of a public outcry and a lot of signs went up. There's some just down the street in front of me that say no jail in my neighborhood. And kind of an objection to having the jail nearby for safety concerns, perhaps property value and other things. But often our jails really are kind of out in the middle of nowhere. And individuals who are convicted of crimes or
00:29:18
Speaker
you know, put in these facilities and are kind of far away from the dealings of everyday life. And since I've kind of had in my research in, you know, the middle ages, often these towns where jury trials would occur, they were small towns where everybody knew each other. And if you were convicting somebody, you were probably convicting
00:29:44
Speaker
your brother or your cousin or somebody pretty in close proximity to you. And as the juror, everyone knew who you were, right? And you had to live with people after the trial. And that isn't really the case for us as much anymore, maybe in some really small towns, but just the sense in which we kind of live separate from and apart from the criminal justice system. And most people, unless they have a job in it, like I said,
00:30:10
Speaker
prison guard or as a judge or police officer, prosecutor, criminal offense attorney aren't really going to deal with people, incarcerated people on any kind of a regular basis. There's an anonymity that risks seeming to make the decision impartial, like it makes it seem impartial because of that distance. Right. And it makes me think, and I've heard of this idea that
00:30:37
Speaker
Like in a firing squad, not every single gun has a live bullet. I haven't looked that up. Perhaps y'all can confirm that I've heard that that's the case. And, you know, I thought that, you know, probably that way because people don't want to hold the moral guilt for actually doing the killing.
00:30:53
Speaker
And I don't know if there's anything similar with the person who does the lethal injection. I know there's a similar circuit set up with the electric chair with the pressing the button. I know that that's a historical use of electric chair to have that same moral, I don't know.
00:31:13
Speaker
But also, I think, if I'm not mistaken, that lethal injection, there are some rules set up, I think, by the some association of doctors, where it's like they don't want people who are trained in putting people under to have to actually kill someone. It's going to go against like, oh, maybe the Hippocratic oath. So there's something there, too. I'm not really fully aware of.
00:31:40
Speaker
Right. And that kind of leads into another area that I think we started to explore. And I hadn't thought about too deeply, but it kind of came out a little bit in our conversation is often people talk about, you know, various rights, right to life, or there's, there's been some discussion about, you know, people having a right to death or a right to assisted suicide. You could potentially imagine, maybe a
00:32:09
Speaker
religious free exercise argument saying in effect my religious beliefs don't believe that it's correct for the state to put people to death, right? I don't necessarily think that would get a lot of traction, but if your religion has kind of a consistent life ethic, right?
00:32:33
Speaker
And you don't believe that killing is right under any circumstances. You could imagine that a religious belief in that could also extend to the state, not actually really having the right to put people to death either. Now the state is the state and is sovereign in some sense, right? And has that power, that sheer power to be able to do that. But you're asking this question about
00:33:02
Speaker
of what are the impacts of this case and where could things go. I think more practically speaking, we may see additional religious pre-exercise claims that might come up in the context of an execution chamber. So we just saw laying on of hands, we saw vocal prayer,
00:33:27
Speaker
I think that probably will cover quite a bit, but maybe like a religious anointing, right? In my tradition, sometimes there are religious anointings that are done for the healing of the sick, right? So like using oil on the head of an individual. That's just one example I could think of. That wasn't necessarily covered in the Ramirez decision and maybe something like that.
00:33:56
Speaker
might come up. I think we talked about maybe somebody requesting a baptism or a sprinkling right before execution. I don't know if that would ever result. But I think if someone did come up with one that was sincerely held and they really needed it or felt that they needed it as required by their religion, the court might
00:34:21
Speaker
take a hard look at something like that. Now, as I stated earlier, the tradition of something I think really helps. And in this case, and in this line of cases with the presence of clergy and prayer and laying on a pans, those are kind of entrenched traditional religious practices that are pretty well known. So some of these certain religious requests that are more uncommon or less traditional,
00:34:48
Speaker
I don't know how sympathetic the court will be to those or not, but you could imagine using remarriage to the collier as precedent. These individuals or certain individuals may be trying to add certain religious practices on. Now, again, these won't even make it up to the courts if the state or the prison systems accommodate or find ways to accommodate these religious requests.
00:35:15
Speaker
through Iron Looper, right.
Conclusion and Credits
00:35:16
Speaker
And if they are able to work it out amongst themselves, right, they will never really make it up to the port.
00:35:25
Speaker
Yeah, I do want to ask, considering the right to life claim we were talking about. The one thing that I seem to see as a difference, even though people are talking about the abortion debate in terms of cases like these. It seems as though it places an emphasis on like the punitive nature of our justice system because I can imagine someone who is.
00:35:47
Speaker
very pro-life saying well those babies are innocent right and they want to say there should be like this punitive justice for someone who's committed some sort of moral wrong where the right the right to death or the right to life that becomes blurry for them because they do believe in this punitive nature of the justice system they don't believe in rehabilitation they don't want prisoners
00:36:09
Speaker
to, in this case, for Ramirez or for other prisoners, find a faith practice, be rehabilitated in the justice system. I think that that's part of the debate where you want to argue that a child is completely innocent and these people don't deserve that same level. I don't think I've seen people broach that because that's a topic I often see come up when we're talking right to life. And I wonder if that would complicate, I guess, the correlation or maybe just shed a light on, again, our punitive
00:36:38
Speaker
our punitive view of the justice system and what it should be doing in society. Right, right. And I think that, like, as you suggest, that might be a reason why a pro-life person, right, might also be in favor of the death penalty. Yeah. And the logic would, yeah, I think the logic, the logic to that would be the child was innocent, but you know, the person convicted is not innocent. And then
00:37:07
Speaker
you know, somehow has forfeited their right to life by their actions. You see these people on death row saying like, I'm not the same person I was 12 years ago. And to some extent that barely does ring true. Like 12 years is a long time, for example. And so you look back and I'm sure many prisoners could have this experience of saying, I don't recognize that person. It's been so long. Right. Yeah. So that brings up the question of like some of what I've tried to do in the criminal law and religion blog is
00:37:37
Speaker
just kind of explore just how close religion and particularly the Christian tradition in our Western context and our Western legal system, how close they really are in history and how much overlap there's been throughout time. And now as the two spheres of religion and state have arguably separated more over time, there's still this question of
00:38:07
Speaker
Um, you know, what, what role does redemption, forgiveness, penance, repentance, um, I guess even reformation or I think, um, you know, in a more secular term, rehabilitation, right? But it may be in a religious way, uh, repentance, redemption. What role does that play or should it play, um, in the criminal justice system?
00:38:35
Speaker
And I think you're right. I think, you know, on the one hand, there are people who've committed, you know, horrendous acts or allegedly committed them or have been convicted of them. And then, you know, the question is, can they be redeemed, right? And for my own tradition, I don't personally believe that there's
00:38:59
Speaker
anybody who's beyond the point of redemption. Some people may not choose it, but it's possible for all no matter what they've done. A quote by Bryan Stevenson, who's a person who influenced me a lot, is a person basically, when I'm paraphrasing, shouldn't be defined by the worst thing they've ever done. If that was the case for all of us, that would be a
00:39:29
Speaker
pretty awful, right? Because you and I and all of us may not have, you know, permitted a horrendous crime, but we all have certainly done something or things that we're not proud of. And do we want to be branded and defined by that forever? And I think the answer is no. And is there some kind of place
00:39:54
Speaker
for mercy, some kind of place for redemption, for forgiveness. I like to believe that there is. And when it gets into how that interacts with the rule of law and justice and the state, it's difficult. And a lot of ink has been spilled on.
00:40:17
Speaker
these intersections of religious conceptions of justice and more secular or philosophical conceptions of justice and how they intersect. That's what I think is so interesting about something like issues of criminal law and religion as it just brings up such a rich array of all of these different areas and ideas in our culture, in our history,
00:40:47
Speaker
and in our society, right? And I think that would be better off to look at our history, our tradition, I should say traditions, histories, in our context, the United States more Western, but also Eastern and otherwise, and to see what kinds of good things we might be able to bring to bear from those traditions
00:41:16
Speaker
onto our legal system to make it more just and to make it more conducive to the common good, so to speak. That's part two of our two-part series, The Right to Death, with Pierre Woznik. Thank you for listening.
00:41:34
Speaker
Canopy Forum and the Interactions Podcast are distributed by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and produced by Anna Knudsen and Ethan Anthony. You can follow Canopy Forum on Twitter or Facebook. Follow Interactions on Instagram and subscribe to Interactions on your favorite podcast platform.