I attended a
dramatic reading of
Sister Helen Prejean's book
The Death of Innocents last night. She tells the story of two wrongfully executed men. There are many reasons to abolish capital punishment - killing innocent people is a strong one, and the State has done just that, she points out, more than 130 times in the past few decades. I had seen Sister Helen speak before at Georgetown after
Dead Man Walking, her book about spiritually advising a (guilty) man on death row, had been made into a
film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. She spoke of the
sneakiness of God and said that he leads you through door after door and if you knew what that far door opened to--in her case, death row--you would have never gone through. When she kneeled next to me for this picture, I reminded her of that story and she said, "You know a little about the sneakiness of God, don't you?" Yep.
The recent pirate activity in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia has prompted suggestions from bloggers that the pirates be gibbeted. Being against the death penalty, I disagree. But that punishment has historically been associated with piracy and used to serve as a warning to any considering it. Gibbeting or hanging in chains followed execution and meant displaying the body in a cage until it fell apart from decomposition and scavenging. One of the most famous pirates, Captain William Kidd (c. 1645-1701), was hanged, tarred, and strung up in a cage by the Thames River, where it was visible for years. As it turns out, the only complete gibbet in the U.S. is on display at the Atwater Kent Museum--I'm adding it to my list for the next time I'm in Philadelphia.
