Stephen
Harper ’76 helped lead the successful fight to abolish juvenile
capital punishment in the U.S. last year. His own fight continues.
by John Lombardi
case # 93-10518B and #93-12155A
When he was 16, Damon Peterson, along with two homies, Morrie Bryant and Jonathan Williams, rolled up on a German tourist named Jorg Schell and shot him in the neck. This was outside a Days Inn in Homestead, Florida, a sun-blasted place a little south of Miami, site of the old Air Force Base called “Homestead,” a name that made local felons laugh: “Home-thded,” lisped a gray stray, toeing the dirt in front of the murder site on U.S. 1, nearly 12 years later. “Shoot! Who’d waanta home-thded THITH ?! “
In 1993, when the car-jacking-related crime happened, Damon and his boys were literally shedding blood in their desire to escape the dingy hands they felt life had dealt them. Damon’s young mother, Jo Ann Allen, hadn’t been able to hold on to his father much past her son’s birth in 1976. Charles E. Peterson, a cleaner for Delta Airlines , simply went away. Jo Ann never had another child and never married, but after getting kicked out of her mother’s home for drinking and doing drugs, began living with a series of boyfriends—Stafford Irons, a marijuana dealer and woman-beater, at 1870 Rutland Street in Opa Locka (1979-80); Clement Artis, a violent coke user who broke a toilet seat over her head and a broom handle over Damon’s leg, at 2372 1/2 NW 47th Terrace (1981-85); Lawrence Sheppard, a crackhead, at 2366 NW 101st Street (1985)—but Jo Ann alternated living with Artis and Sheppard for the next 10 years, also taking occasional side-stays with other men, among whom was one Willie Williams (1985-95), whom we’ll hear more of . . .
Damon had seen his mother doing drugs and having sex with all of her boyfriends, and being beaten unmercifully, too. He would occasionally drift back and stay with his grandmother Mary Corston, then float between Artis’s and Sheppard’s apartments, but as things degenerated and Jo Ann’s life unraveled into a kind of anatomy of melancholy, he began living on the street, eating and sleeping where he could, scavenging, stealing; by age 10, he was a regular in Little River Park, 10525 NW 24th Avenue in unincorporated NW Miami-Dade, a no-man’s-land of bums, hookers, junkies, thieves, and other wild kids like himself.
In 1989, when he was 12, Damon and an older boy were arrested for throwing rocks and bricks at cars from overpasses (the case was nolle prossed). Six months later he was arrested for car burglary with two nephews of Vivian Woodard, mother of a friend from Little River Park, a dope addict who sometimes let him stay with her; when he turned 13 he was arrested again for car burglary and later grand theft auto, and was finally committed to the “Try Center,” an experimental Miami facilty for the hordes of largely minority delinquents plaguing Dade County. The Try Center was a non-residential program that concentrated on remotivating troubled kids by attempting to help them establish better relations with their families . . . but Jo Ann never attended conferences and was reported to be heavily addicted to crack at the time.
Damon’s “report card” pronounced him a good boy, having attended classes regularly and having made “good relationships.” But he was living at Sheppard’s part of the time, though not being fed or clothed by him, and for the rest—weather permitting—sleeping in the streets and stealing food from supermarkets like a young coyote. Two weeks after graduating from Try, he was arrested for smashing a car window with a spark plug and stealing a purse, and placed in a shelter until trial (no family members were available to take him). Drug evaluators said he was using marijuana, “about once a week, so Damon was recommended for treatment. A child psychologist found he suffered from “no serious psychopathology” but was “a quiet, almost morose child”. . . The psychologist, Dr. Walter Reid, expressed concerns about the boy’s illiteracy, his mother’s severe addiction, and the fact that he wasn’t attending school at all: “Some cultivating now could keep him out of the adult system . . . .”
* * *
“Of course he didn’t get much in the way of ‘cultivating,’” Stephen Harper ’76, an adjunct professor of juvenile justice at the University of Miami, and Assistant Public Defender in that city, recalls, remembering his first juvenile death penalty case (Damon’s crime was quickly adjusted downward as he pled guilty, accepting a life sentence that may see him paroled in his 40s.) “The realities of some of these kids’ lives are so different from the lives most of us know, our judgmental standards are off . . . I mean it requires an act of imagination to put yourself in their heads, that many jurors and judiciary and police find hard to do . . . it isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just a sad reality of the times . . .” Harper, from Warren, Pennsylvania, operates from a moral perspective he says he came to Haverford to enhance in 1972, his dad Samuel Knox Harper ’38, uncle Heber R. ’42, a lawyer and a political science professor respectively, and brother John L. ’72, a diplomatic history professor at Johns Hopkins in Italy, all having benefited considerably from what he calls “theQuaker traditions of the place.” (Though the Harpers were born Methodists). “Home life, the ’60s and Quaker beliefs had some obvious effect on my opposition to the death penalty,” he says now. After graduation he worked for a year as a laborer, saw a bit of the world, and eventually graduated from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, in 1984: [At Haverford] “I was going to major in history, but got sidetracked by sociology and anthropology. Wyatt McGaffey, Bill Hohenstein, and Mark Gould got me interested in how societies work and why . . . more diverse than I ever knew . . . .”
Harper, a strikingly handsome man whose dark hair is going gray, has about him the air of the more solid lefties of the ’60s—Tom Hayden, Mitch Goodman, Dennis Hayes, Mario Savio—crossed with the forthrightness of a silent movie hero, Richard Todd, maybe, and the contrasting determination of the poet Ted Berrigan . . . A certain clarity of eye much missed in contemporary culture, where wised-up practicality often glazes over moral perception. The tendency today is for left activists to concentrate on “doable” possibilities rather than visionary ones, as if American culture had been tainted by our experience since Reagan, and the whole enterprise dropped a couple of imaginative notches . . . Harper is a practical guy, too, but doesn’t subscribe to such limitations. South Florida fit right into his world view: “In Miami, I thought I could do some good,” he says.
His first priorities involved minority kids, who in the ’80s “Miami Vice” era, were tending to get shot at a lot by cops, and sentenced to jail terms disproportionate to their crimes. Nobody had had it tougher than Damon Peterson.
From the age of 6, school records show an unusually bright, educable boy, but the chaotic life he led pointed straight down. Soon he was missing school and turning inward. By age 12, he was committing crimes. At 16, he was a murderer. When Harper met him he was 5-9, rangy, with a hangdog look, Rastafarian dreadlocks, and knock-off Air-Jordans—“felony kicks.” But they connected: “You could see what he had in him,” Harper remembers. And what a waste there’d been.
Stephen Harper’s long fight against the juvenile death penalty, won a little more than a year ago, when the Supreme Court ruled that youngsters who’d committed capital crimes at less than 18 could no longer be summarily executed in the U.S.—and his campaign against the death penalty in general—can’t be said to have begun with the Peterson case; but they certainly coalesced around it. The emotional flashpoint, though, happened earlier: “I was in law school and visited a man on [Florida State Prison’s] Death Row [at Starke] with a lawyer I was interning with. The guy was crazy [so crazy he’s never been executed]. And yet in the craziness, it was clear that he did not want to die . . . it was like there was an independent force inside him, apart from him.” The condemned man was straining to hear news of an appeal he’d just lost in the 5th Circuit, writhing his head to catch the words better, beyond the patent reassurances and well-meaning generalizations of counsel, and rolling his eyes to see past their professional expressions . . . He wanted to live very badly—right through the mere language of the law . . . “It was life itself,” Harper recalls, remembering the weight of it, and sounding awed. “I remember throwing up after we left the prison and thinking something like what I witnessed was the spirit of life itself, what the Quakers call the light of God within us all . . . For any of us to extinguish it, would be like extinguishing God itself.”
The Damon Peterson case focused most of this, and came to Steve through
his second wife Odalys Acosta, MSW, a therapist at Hialeah Miami Lakes
High School, whom he met at the Public Defender’s Office. She kept
raving about how much insight and intelligence the young man had, and
how much damage he’d sustained. “He was [already] trying to
get educated and was being used by the jail in ‘scared straight’
classes for troubled kids,” Harper told me. [As a Muslim Imam] “He
[now] helps young fellows coming into the system for the first time, who
aren’t sentenced [to long terms], to cope, to make something of
themselves [not just get caught up in the drugs, violence, and perversion
of prison culture.] He’s a much better man than he was when he came
in. He’s helping. By the time he gets out, he’ll have developed
in ways that couldn’t have been foreseen…” And that
wouldn’t have happened if prosecutors hadn’t agreed to a deal,
because before Steve’s and other anti-juvenile death penalty law
teams’ efforts, the U.S. saw 22 children executed, two-thirds of
them in Texas, in the “modern,” post-1973 years. Florida hadn’t
put a child to death recently, reversing many sentences, but feeling was
running high in the Miami area on Peterson, as a series of auto-jacking
deaths had been plaguing European tourists—especially Germans for
some reason—for several years, and the state’s lifeblood is
tourism. It was a squeaker for Damon, but Harper successfully petitioned
State Attorney Katharine Fernandez-Rundle to allow his client a life sentence
instead of “Old Sparky,” as Florida wits used to call the
electric chair. And hope of parole sometime in his 40s . . . “for
someone,” as Damon put it, “to show me the mercy I was never
taught or showed [to his own victim].”
Damon’s mom, Jo Ann Allen, was one of six children born to Mary
Corston. All of Corston’s kids had different fathers. Many were
abusive, too, so a psychological pattern of “acceptance” formed
in Damon’s mother’s and grandmother’s minds. “Men
are just like that, Damon,” he was told. Corston didn’t work
regularly, and often left the children with relatives. Jo Ann was raised
by an elderly aunt and uncle in rural Plant City, Florida, strict and
abusive to the point where screaming and beatings with frying pans were
“just like that,” too. Corston only saw Jo Ann twice a year,
spending her life in Miami bouncing among boyfriends not fond of family
responsibility . . . After graduating from high school, though, Jo Ann
sought her mother out, and lived for a while with her and a sister. Her
siblings were mostly in trouble, too:
As of 1996, the Miami Public Defender’s office filed the following
notes on them:
• Her oldest brother, Murphy, had active AIDS, was a drug addict,
and had served prior prison terms.
• Her sister Wendy Miller was addicted to drugs.
• Her brother Anthony had prior incarcerations, was a mentally ill
drug addict, and was HIV positive.
• Only her sister Maryanne was a manager at K-Mart.
Ms. Corston did not remember the dates of her own children’s births.
Damon and Jo Ann lived with Corston until Damon was three. At that point her mother decided that Jo Ann was experimenting with cocaine and marijuana, and threw them out, though she would occasionally let Damon crash with her when things grew too hectic with his mother’s boyfriends. When Damon was four, Jo Ann began seriously abusing drugs and alcohol, neglecting him in favor of her addictions. From that time on, she was dependent on “boyfriends” who provided her with drugs and a roof in return for sex, and who turned her into a battered woman.
The first was Stafford Irons. While Jo Ann worked part-time in a nursing home, he sold weed, visited other “girlfriends” and got into fights. He would often take Damon with him to visit one of his ladies, and the boy watched them doing drugs. She was jealous, and caused fights between Jo Ann and Stafford, with Jo Ann always getting the worst of it. Damon would cower behind the TV, until his bruised mother would drop with exhaustion on the couch, begging him to “take care of your Momma.” Damon would stay with her all night, and now remembers this as the only affection he ever received from her.
But he was incredibly protective of, and tender toward, Jo Ann, and felt helpless in not being able to defend her from the blows and curses of Irons, Clement Artis, Lawrence Sheppard, and the rest. Jo Ann suffered broken arms, black eyes, and deep bruises on a regular basis. It got to the point where she was so high or dazed she didn’t recognize her son on the street. He went to live with a relatively stable drug dealer, Vivian Woodard, but she sometimes turned on him too, and a slow-burning rage was lit that fueled his later crime spree.
When he was nearly 14, he and his mother were walking down the street when a man on a bike approached them. It was Willie Williams, another of her boyfriends, and he jumped off and began beating Jo Ann with a large stick. Damon threw rocks at him, but he kept smashing at Jo Ann until he’d broken an arm and ribs, and she was bloody and unable to move. She subsequently lost all hearing in her left ear.
Four days later Williams was arrested, but Damon, with his mother in the hospital and possibly dying, began having a series of nightmares. When Jo Ann recovered and suggested revenge, he found Williams and despite his young age beat him badly, but because of his premature “adult” appearance, Williams thought Damon was her boyfriend Clement Artis, and the cops picked Artis up. To make things right with her man, Jo Ann then took Damon to the police station and, incredibly, turned him in! He was held for months at the Juvenile Detention Center at 3300 NW27th Avenue , but his mother refused to see him there, for fear of angering Artis. Later, when he was in jail for burglary and auto theft, another of her boyfriends was being held in the same facility. She visited the boyfriend, but wouldn’t see Damon.
Later, after Damon shot Jorg Schell, she drifted away to South Carolina, and now barely talks to her son by phone, where, as inmate #196657, he has been incarcerated at the Apalachee Correctional Institution in Sneads, Florida, since 1997, when he was 21 . . . He is now 30, six feet tall, 190 pounds . . . .
The impetus to defeat the juvenile death penalty in the U.S. is older than the country, the first “American” children having been put to death in the colonies in 1642. Since then, at least 366 executions of minors have taken place—early records aren’t always exact. From nearly the beginning, on religious or humanitarian grounds, individuals have tried to intervene in the cases of children accused of capital crimes or other “horrendous” acts. Juvenile judgmental abilities and “moral” sense weren’t considered as adequately developed, even back in kneestocking times, though special circumstances, like “infestation” (possession), would sometimes warrant a hanging, smothering, stoning, stabbing, or burning. Certain moral wrongs invited God’s terrible wrath.
The idea that kids aren’t as responsible for their actions as “hardened” adults, always present in some form, was mitigated by sterner, Old Testament religious views in those days. But what was interesting until March 1, 2005, when the Supreme Court finally ruled 5-4 to abolish, was the fact that the U.S. was one of the few countries left in the world that did condone the juvenile death penalty—along with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, Yemen, China, and the Congo. Strange company one would think, and a fascinating, speculative doctoral thesis for ambitious legal or sociology candidates . . . .
A father of the postmodern anti-juvenile death penalty movement was clearly
Victor L. Streib, professor of law at Ohio Northern University, author
of over 300 books, chapters, articles, and papers, plus interviews on
“60 Minutes,” and in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
on “All Things Considered,” etc., arguing against the dp.
(“I told him for years that he pushed the boulder up the hill alone,”
Harper says now.) Streib, beginning around the time pro-death penalty
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia replaced Justice Louis Powell in
1986, inspired other liberal lawyers, judges, and professors to form action
groups, such as the Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty,
Journey of Hope, Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, Network
for Justice, Quixote Center, Philadelphia Juvenile
Law Center, etc. But it wasn’t until 1999, when Steve Drizin, Assistant
Director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern Law School in Chicago,
and Supervising Attorney of the Children and Family Justice Center there;
Bob Schwartz of the PJLC; Dr. Laurence Steinberg, Distinguished University
Professor of Psychology at Temple and Director of its Graduate Program,
and Patti Puritz, Executive Director of the American Bar Association’s
National Juvenile Defender Center in Washington, D.C., who all happened
to be friends of Stephen Harper, helped form the Juvenile Death Penalty
Initiative. It included some of the above and also the Florida Justice
Project, the International Justice Project, and the Criminal Justice Reform
Education Fund. In addition, it had ties to the AMA, the ABA, the American
Psychiatric Association, the Child Welfare league, NEA, National Council
on Crime and Delinquency, the European Union, the Pope, and former President
Jimmy Carter. In the late ’90s, after a long trend toward more and
more executions, both juvenile and adult (in the face of rising waves
of crack-fueled criminal violence in the cities and suburbs), a curious
counter-feeling began. Suddenly, after 1999, even tough states like Florida
were cutting back on juvenile executions. “It was a kind of revulsion,”
Puritz believes. “You can’t kill all capital defendants,”
Steve Drizen says dryly.
Schwartz, Drizen, and Harper were all Haverford grads, Schwartz being slightly older and something of a mentor to the others, having worked as a pre-law adviser here. They bonded intellectually on many liberal issues, but the death penalty seemed to unite them emotionally. The JDPI provided technical assistance and coordinated efforts to try to prevent death sentences for kids, and to lobby for legislation to end the jdp. Puritz remembers Harper’s emergence as the driving force in their campaign:
“He’s gentle and kind . . . doesn’t accept the general cruelty many adults steel themselves to. He’s very smart. Passionate. I’d want him to defend me in any serious case. And you have to remember the anti-death penalty issue wasn’t terribly popular when we got into this. Not a big constituency out there [given the conservative public opinion sweep for most of the years since Reagan] . . . In our group, Drizen led at first, but pulled back after awhile, and Stephen took over.”
The bellwether case on the jdp turned out to be a problematic 1993 murder in Missouri, Roper vs. Simmons, in which Christopher Simmons , then 17, and a friend, only 15, broke into a middle-aged female truckdriver’s trailer, bound her with tape, drove her vehicle off a bridge, and netted $6. Simmons and his friend, who committed the murder/robbery for money to buy drugs, were quickly convicted, and Simmons sentenced to die. Particularly maddening was Simmons’ alleged boast to friends that even if he were caught, he wouldn’t get the death penalty because of his age. A true test of liberal belief.
He had a bumpy legal ride, since “Show Me” state prosecutors were adamant in their desire to see the original sentence carried out, but eventually the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that Simmons’ conviction violated his Eighth Amendment rights and constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.” Because of his “immaturity.” Missouri prosecutors then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, after months of hearing arguments and weighing precedents, agreed on the close 5-4 vote to uphold the Missouri decision: “This is a great day,” said Marsha Levick of the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center. “It confirms that America’s standards of decency have indeed evolved and that children are different,” Stephen Harper told The Christian Science Monitor. Antonin Scalia, however, along with the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Clarence Thomas, disagreed, arguing essentially that the meaning of the Eighth Amendment should not be determined by “five members of this court [Kennedy, Ginsburg, Souter, Stevens, and Breyer], and like-minded foreigners”—a reference to world opinion, which had turned irrevocably against the jdp in the last 20 years. Nevertheless, 72 young death-row inmates in 12 states were then removed from what Texas cons have come to call “countdown mode.”
The fulcrum for making the case that children under 18 should not be executed was based on a strategy founded on the scientific research of men and women like Dr. Ruben C. Gur, Chief of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and a professor of psychiatry, neurology, and radiology at the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd of McClean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and Harvard, an investigator of how the brain changes from adolescence into adulthood; Dr. Abigail Baird of Dartmouth; and Dr. Jay Geidd at the National Institute of Mental Health
Different centers of the brain, it seems, each with distinctive roles, are sometimes at odds: The thumb-sized amygdala, for example, is a bank of emotional impulse, while the frontal cortex, is a locus of planning, regulating emotions, and understanding the consequences of behavior. (Both are located in the frontal lobe.) The amygdala might urge you to drink a six-pack and drive at high speed, while the FC puts the brakes on. Yurgelun-Todd conducted MRI studies on youngsters from 11 to 18 , and contrasted them with similar studies on adults. They showed that the frontal cortex was least active in the youngest subjects, while its activity increased steadily as age did. Also, the reverse was true of the amygdala: “That in particular made us think that the likelihood for impulsive behavior [is greater in adolescents], though MRIs can’t prove this conclusively,” Yurgelun-Todd observes.
Gur concurs that a process involving the over-production of “gray matter” (which enhances the “thinking process”), increases during adolescence—accounting for erratic adolescent reasoning—and is gradually “pruned” back during the early 20s, accompanied by another phenomenon called “myelination,” which involves the brain’s “white matter,” or “insulation.” White matter tissue focuses, refines, and makes the brain’s operation smoother and more precise. But these activities are not complete until the ages of 22 to 24, and are in fact the last things in the brain to mature. “These results have profound implications for understanding behavioral development,” Gur says, “perhaps most relevant . . . in the control of aggression and other impulses . . . planning for long-range goals, consideration of alternatives and consequences, and in . . . processing moral judgment.” This would appear to demonstrate conclusively that those under 18 are organically less morally culpable than adults. Science over law.
In the planning strategies to fight the jdp, Harper’s group and others decided the precedent of an earlier Supreme Court ruling in favor of banning the execution of mentally deficient defendants provided a rough parallel. If organic deficits were operating in one case, why not another? Eventually this tactic proved successful, though the parallels are inexact. There is no way to set a standard of precise measurement of how someone’s amygdala was doing vs. his frontal cortex, during the commission of a crime, or to determine whether pruning and myelination were functioning properly at the crucial moment (as there is to establish diminished capacity). It would seem for example, safer to argue the organic effects of stress or drugs on the body and mind at particular times—Damon Peterson, a quiet, good-natured, bright kid forced into hellish living conditions and eventually acting out destructively, vs. Christopher Simmons, whose background was not as extenuating, and who appeared to behave in a more premeditated way.
But law crusade rationales can’t become too dense. Certain expedient
arguments must be made in order to carry the day . . . It’s the
difference between serious advocacy and serious prose of all kinds . .
.
Which is not to say that the science-based argument for the importance
of the frontal lobe is dismissable, something Stephen Harper found out
for himself in September 2001, in the most profound way. He’d been
feeling off, experiencing some problems in doing a number of simultaneous
tasks in the Public Defender’s Office and at the University of Miami;
he was suddenly spelling with difficulty, having short-term memory loss,
having trouble concentrating, and experiencing a shorter temper—so
he went in for tests.
He was diagnosed with an astrocytoma, a tumor in the left frontal lobe and small part of the amygdala. It was interfering with frontal lobe activity in some of the ways listed above, and so was operated on. Most but not all of it was removed. Radiation and chemo have shrunk it further, and it is a slow-growing cancer, so he’s fine cognitively, experiences no pain . . . it’s just that the tumor is likely to accelerate. Prognosis is guarded. He gets MRIs every three months . . . median survival rate is about seven years after surgery.
“I remember after Stephen had his operation, as soon as he felt well enough, we all [anti-jdp lawyers] gathered in a hotel on Miami Beach, and we were in this room, everyone was being discreet—but he was the most energetic of us, the one urging us on,” says Patti Puritz, his old friend: ‘I think I’ve found the way to beat this [jdp]!’ he told us, “explaining the frontal cortex research. People had gathered around his chair. We all believed in the rightness of our cause, but he felt it more, as if it was his life at stake, not some worthy names culled from reports e-mailed in from around the country . . .” She broke off, then added that she loved Stephen: “He sees the whole process, the unfairness [of defendant social situations], the politics [of prosecution cases], the odds against [poor] defendants—and yet he goes on fighting.”
* * *
We were in the living room area of Stephen Harper’s home in the Miami Shores section of North Miami. A big, comfortable house, converted from a snowbird retreat of the 1940s—pre-air-conditioning construction with no dividing walls separating the dining room, Florida room, and living room, so that the cross-breeze goes unobstructed.
His sons Alex, 17, and Sam, 13, from his first marriage, were bouncing around. Odalys, who despite her children (also from a previous marriage), Joe, 22, Kali, 21, and Jason, 19, looks like a teenager herself, was preparing a feast of arroz con pollo, frijoles negros, and plantains. Dos Equis beer flowed better than wine.
It was two months before the Supreme Court would rule, and Steve was being cautiously optimistic: “It’s important to remember that we work on a kid-to-kid basis—we’re not against punishment where it’s warranted. We don’t represent some ‘liberal conspiracy’ of left judges, lawyers, academics, and students . . . some ‘line’ of thinking with roots in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” [Old Left anti-fascist Spanish Civil War American volunteers]—this despite the networking of the JDPI.
“I’ve always thought that when it came to capital punishment, the desire to kill a killer by legal means was simply dressing up the base human instincts of fear and anger. Death penalty proceedings are surreal. The legal process is almost mundane and everyone acts like it’s just civil litigation! There is no humanity. Tony Amsterdam [Haverford ’57, an attorney long active in anti-death penalty activities, whom Steve’s father Knox once cited to his young son as “a real lawyer”] said: ‘The decisions that lawyers make and mediate in capital prosecutions come as close to exercising God’s own powers as humanity can come. Not only is the judgment to take life irreversible, it is literally incomprehensible. Whatever else we humans know, life and death are mysteries beyond our understanding; and when we decree that a person’s life is forfeit, however solemnly, however righteously, we commit an act whose nature and consequences we cannot grasp.’ No one seems to be able to take on this reality. Tellingly, everyone involved in the process tries to pass responsibility for actually taking the life. The prosecutors say they are just following the law. The jury is told that they are simply making a recommendation, that the judge will make the final decision. The judge says that he/she is just following the jury’s recommendation. The executioners say they are just carrying out the sentence of someone else . . . .”
I told Harper his argument finally sounded spiritual. Man’s evasiveness precludes his presumptions to act as a god.
“It’s why you’re against death,” I tried.
“It’s why I’m for life,” he corrected me.