Rev. Terry Davis
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation on
February 14, 2016
“The Old Rugged Cross” – the hymn that Herbert Richardson requested to be played on the evening of his execution – opens with these lyrics:
On a hill far away, stood an old rugged Cross
The emblem of suff’ring and shame.
And I love that old Cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged Cross
Till my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged Cross
And exchange it some day for a crown.
I hope that Herbert, who was Christian, found comfort in the hymn’s message of promise and peace.
Death row inmate attorney Bryan Stevenson tells a troubling and heartbreaking story of Herbert’s journey to death row in Alabama. It’s one that was loaded with bad luck, bad choices, and tragic consequences. It’s one that left me wondering how we, as a society, might ever untangle the gnarled knot of racism, poverty, and our complex law enforcement system . . . a knot that continues to incarcerate African American men at an astoundingly disproportionate rate . . . a gnarled knot that results in the deaths of African American men like Herbert.
The knot of injustice that executes Herbert and others as if the full story of their lives leaves us no other choice is a stubborn and ugly one. This morning, we’re going to pull on that knot a bit and examine its strands. And, my hope is that we will leave our service today not with answers to the question “Why does this happen?” but, rather, some thoughts about the question “What can we do to change it?”
We’re examining this knot of injustice in our Second Sunday sermon series for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because the nearly 3,000 U.S. prisoners like Herbert who are on death row today are our neighbors. Though locked away and nearly forgotten, they deserve our attention and care. Because whether you grew up Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Unitarian Universalist, or in no faith tradition at all, my guess is that somewhere along the way you encountered the counsel that loving one another is the key to healing suffering hearts and a broken world.
And, so we are compelled to love our neighbors – and we must love them ALL. We must not only because their lives depend upon it, but because ours do, too. Our emotional, physical and spiritual well-being depends upon a love that makes no distinctions between who is and who isn’t worthy to receive it.
In the Christian tradition, from which Unitarian Universalism descends, Jesus’ admonition was “love thy neighbor as thyself.” This was an invitation to be generous. It was an invitation to love not only the persons we liked or to love the persons we thought were living morally upright lives. It applied to everyone.
Love thy neighbor of course means loving the sick and the outcast . . . and it also means loving the person whose religion, politics, wealth, and morals are far different from ours. In Jesus’s day, that included Roman emperors, tax collectors and soldiers, wealthy merchants, and Samaritans, and especially lepers, children, and poor widows – in other words, both the most vulnerable AND the most powerful people in his society.
Today, our Unitarian Universalist First and Second Principles remind us of the spiritual necessity of practicing radical and inclusive love. These principles affirm that every human life has worth and dignity and that our relationships with others are to be guided by justice, equity and compassion. And, our flaming chalice, which is the symbol Unitarians used during World War II as we conducted rescue and humanitarian work in Europe, offers another powerful reminder that we must love thy neighbor no matter who and where they are.
And so, with our religious heritage behind us and our principles before us, I’d like for us to consider this morning what our responsibility may be to our neighbors on death row. What might we do to help change these circumstances?
Herbert Richardson was Bryan Stevenson’s death row client . . . and he was also a man with a troubled past . . . a man who needed help from his neighbors, long before the day of his execution when people kindly and much belatedly, tried to attend to his needs. In our reading this morning from the book Just Mercy, Stevenson asks:
Where were all of these helpful people when Herbert was three and his mother died? Where were they when he was seven and trying to recover from physical abuse? Where were they when he was a young teen struggling with drugs and alcohol? Where were they when he returned from Vietnam traumatized and disabled?[ref]Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, (Spiegel & Grau, New York, NY: 2014), 89 – 90.[/ref]
I imagine many of us often hear stories of men and women who overcame poverty, violence, lack of education, and other oppressive circumstances and were able to succeed in life. We’re amazed and inspired by these tales. Sometimes when we dig deeper, we find that these people had a helping hand or an encouraging word along the way from a teacher, a coach, or a friend.
But what about those who don’t? What about people like Herbert? Once again, what is our responsibility to them? What does justice look like for death row inmates . . . and for those whose lives are touched by theirs?
Activists like Bryan Stevenson operate in what might be considered the deep end of the pool. While he does help incarcerated juveniles in his role as an attorney,
Stevenson mostly deals with adult African American males whose lives have already been battered by poverty, violence, family disruption, and racial discrimination – factors that studies confirm provide fertile ground for criminal behavior.
These incarcerated men are now facing the harshest possible consequences for their behavior. Stevenson and others like him don’t believe that death row inmates are lost causes, but not everyone possesses Stevenson’s fortitude. This is why programs aimed at supporting underprivileged youth are so important in our country – they intervene at a critical time in the lives of children and youth and offer new models, new interests and new life coping skills.
One of the reasons Northwest partners with the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, for example, is because it serves a primarily low-income, African American community by offering environmental education and outdoor service activities for children and teens. The West Atlanta Watershed Alliance gives these kids alternatives and provides an opportunity to ignite their passion for caring for the earth.
Similarly, today’s Share the Plate recipient – the Phoenix Boys Association – offers an opportunity to intervene in the lives of African American boys and male teens with a mentoring program, and exposure to scouting and other esteem-building activities. We’ll be hearing more about them later today.
For those like Herbert Richardson, whose lives have slipped through the cracks and whose neighbors didn’t notice, didn’t care, or didn’t know how to offer positive alternatives and support, Stevenson tells us that it’s not too late to do something about their plight. For instance, in a recent interview, Stevenson noted that the elimination of private prisons is urgently needed to take the profit motive out of the incarceration system and refocus it, instead, on reducing its population.
“In 1980, we spent $6 billion dollars a year on prisons. Now we spend $80 billion,” Stevenson said. “That money has come from public education, from public transportation . . . from health and human services. And, it’s largely been pushed by a small group of private, correctional people who are spending millions of dollars to incentivize others to keep people in jails or prisons. “And, I think that’s very corruptive of our justice and prison system.”[ref]Ibid.[/ref]
Related to the privatization of prisons, Stevenson also suggests that we need to get the politics of “fear and anger” out of our society, which he contends has led to mass incarceration and has destroyed families and communities.
“Politicians use fear about crime and anger about crime to political benefits, Democrats and Republicans, [he says]. And, so we criminalized a lot of things that weren’t really crimes,” especially drug-related activities, which Stevenson says accounts for half of the increase in the prison population.
Ultimately, Stevenson believes that we need to hold our politicians accountable and push them to have conversations on this issue of over-incarceration. And, he believes that faith communities like ours can have a unique and effective role in moving these conversations forward, because they can speak to the problem from a moral perspective.
“I think part of the problem in this country is that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world and we’re not ashamed of it” Stevenson says. He continues, “And somebody’s got to be saying, ‘We ought to be ashamed of putting such a high percentage of our population in prisons. That’s not the land of the free.’”[ref]Ibid.[/ref]
Stevenson notes that we tolerate unreliability and wrongful convictions. With a significant number of innocent people being exonerated, Stevenson says that we really don’t get too excited about that. “We need to create some moral outrage,” Stevenson charges. “You’ve got to stand when your friends are sitting. You have to speak even when others are quiet.”[ref]Ibid.[/ref]
He continues, “We can do better than put 2.4 million people in prison. We have 10,000 kids in prison right now in adult jails and prisons where they’re being sexually assaulted, where their suicide risk is about eight times greater than would be otherwise. And no one can really defend it. We just haven’t got our act together to insist that those kids ought to be out of prison.”[ref]Ibid.[/ref]
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Intervention and support programs for at-risk children and teens, calls to dismantle the privatization of the prison system, holding our elected officials accountable for creating an atmosphere of fear and anger, and finding and using our voice and moral authority to call attention to the mass incarceration of African American men and children . . . these are all things we can do to hopefully minimize the possibility that men like Herbert will find themselves in prison and on death row.
But what about those who prisoners who are already convicted and awaiting death?What is happening in Georgia around this issue and what can we do to change things?
As some of you know, less than two weeks ago, Georgia’s oldest death row inmate was executed after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in. Brandon Astor Jones was eleven days’ shy of his 73rd birthday when he was executed by lethal injection for robbing and killing Roger Thackett in 1979, an Atlanta convenience store manager. At the time of his death, Jones had served a total of 37 years on death row.
While I’m not saying that Jones shouldn’t have been held accountable for his crime (I think he should have), I find it challenging to know how executing an older man who has spent most of his adult life in prison accomplishes anything. Was killing Jones – or executing any death row inmate – really the best way for Georgia to serve justice to wounded families and society?
I hope not. I hope that we can do better than that.
I hope that Georgia – which is fifth among the leading capital punishment states in executions – could find other ways to help bring restitution to victims of heinous crimes.
Like Maryland, which concluded that it costs $3 million, or three times as much, to prosecute a death penalty case than one where the prosecutor doesn’t seek the death penalty, I hope that Georgia – which has never completed such a study – could do its homework and see how financially damaging the death penalty is to building the kind of state we want for our all our citizens.
I hope that Georgia – a state in which 80 percent of persons accused of crimes cannot afford their own attorney – would stop slashing the public defender budget and fulfill its Constitutional obligation to provide attorneys for all of those accused of crimes.
I hope that Georgia can be a more just and more compassionate state. And, I hope that I – that all of us – will examine our hearts and consider how we might help make that so. We’ll be talking about these opportunities in the days ahead and in our final program in March on Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy.
Bryan Stevenson’s work as an attorney and an activist calls us to pay attention not only to our laws, but to our faith. With more than two million incarcerated people in the United States, an additional six million people on probation or parole, and an estimated 68 million Americans with criminal records, there are endless opportunities for you and me to do something to help the incarcerated or the formerly incarcerated.[ref]Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, 319.[/ref]
Let’s stand when others are sitting. Let’s speak when others are quiet. Let’s live into our Unitarian Universalist First and Second Principles and create some moral outrage. All of our neighbors, including those on death row, are waiting. Blessed be and Amen.