Death Penalty: ‘Access to justice means access to life’

By Kielce Gussie

More than half of the world’s population lives in countries where the death penalty still exists, including Iran, the United States, China and Saudi Arabia.

In the US, the pressure is high to pardon the more than 2,100 Americans sitting on death row before January 6. Activists are calling for President Joe Biden to use his “presidential clemency powers” to pardon 44 federal death row inmates who are in danger of execution when Donald Trump is sworn in as one of the promises the president-elect has made is that he will execute the remaining people on federal death row. 

A meeting for life

The Community of Sant’Egidio in Rome is holding the 14th edition of their International Congress of Justice Ministers on November 28 to debate the issue of the death penalty around the world. Since 2005, this meeting has brought ministers, activists, and organizations from across the globe to “create a space for dialogue and discussion between different systems of the exercise of justice and to foster processes of moratorium and abolition of capital punishment.”

As Amnesty International reports, as of 2022, 55 states still have capital punishment and, as Whitney Yang says, it will only be abolished when everyone gets involved. “It requires grassroots, everyday people, members of the public calling their representatives, calling their government telling them that they believe in the right to life,” the anti-death penalty activist says in an interview with Vatican News.

Yang is fighting, in particular, for the freedom of one death row inmate in the United States: Billie Allen. 27 years ago, he was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. She joins her voice with others at the meeting to call for an end to the death penalty because, as she explains, “life is sacred all life is sacred, and no human should have the right to take another's life.”

South Africa paving the way

With the dawn of democracy in South Africa in 1994, the country abolished the death penalty one year later because “access to justice was about access to life,”  as Thembi Nkadimeng, South Africa’s new minister of justice describes. She says South Africa has the important role of helping “other African countries to follow” their example in abolishing capital punishment.

Speaking to Vatican News at the meeting in Rome, the Minister of Justice expresses her hope that other countries may become “one” in this, in protecting the “dignity of even a perpetrator, who still deserves crime” because she warns that you cannot recover a life “once it is lost.”

Nkadimeng argues it is necessary to move away from the idea the punishment for a crime is death. Rather, she says, the punishment should be one “that builds the community,” for true justice to happen,  the perpetrator should still be able to rejoin society after rehabilitation.