John H Armstrong

At the Death House Door: A Film That Pushed Me Over the Edge

I have had very serious doubts about the practice of capital punishment in America for decades. I know the arguments for it quite well. I fell back on those arguments, and the Old Testament texts that can be used to support them, until I felt the whole issue crumbling under my feet about 15 years ago. Like so many similar changes in my thinking I processed my thoughts, read more widely, studied the Scripture much more carefully and just listened a great deal. I read the classical texts on the issue from church history and the modern arguments by supporters and opponents. Like so many of these kinds of issues there is a great deal of emotion involved in coming to any conclusion. Most of the time your mind will go to the worst case scenario and leave it there. But the worst case scenario argument was finally resolved for me by watching a new film, At the Death House Door. Let me explain why.This remarkable film is the story of Rev. Carroll Pickett, a Presbyterian minister. After serving as a local pastor in Huntsville, Texas, where he performed the funeral of two ladies in his congregation who were taken hostage and brutally killed in a 1970s attempt by two men to break out, Pickett became more involved in the prison. He eventually become the prison chaplain and left his local parish ministry. moving into a small home across the street from the prison. He would also lose his marriage in the process, a sad testimony to the stress he lived under for decades. He ended up spending the remainder of his entire ministerial lifetime working in and out of the famous Texas penitentiary at Huntsville. The story the film presents is that of dealing with capital punishment. Pickett was the minister who was there for 95 inmates who were put to death when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was not "cruel and unusual punishment" and Texas began to put criminals to death more than any other American state. The number of Texas executions now numbers over 400. There is a brief clip on this film of former-governor George W. Bush explaining why he believed in this action of the state. (Bush has no sympathy for ending capital punishment even though it has been proven, beyond any reasonable shadow of doubt, that innocent people have been executed in Texas!)

At the Death House Door is not fun to watch but I would urge every serious Christian to see it. Not only is Carroll Pickett's story remarkable but the way he tells it is moving. (There is a fascinating account, told by Pickett, of his being told in seminary that he would be a minister who would care for the dying in an unusual way! I believe that such prophetic words are often spoken in ways that can prepare us for what it ahead.) Pickett lived alone for many of the years that he shared these death house experiences. To talk out his feelings he made tape recordings. Some of these are now made public in the film. They are very, very moving accounts of what he saw and felt. For anyone who thinks people die painlessly by lethal injection they ought to hear the truth that Pickett reveals. (Pickett witnessed the first lethal injection ever performed in the world.)

But no execution troubled Pickett like that of Carlos De Luna, a young man who Pickett believed was innocent. Do not misunderstand, Pickett makes it clear that men who confessed their crimes to him would later say, as their dying words, "I am innocent." They had so blinded themselves that they could not face reality. But De Luna was innocent. The story is convincing and the evidence abundant. The film tracks two Chicago Tribune reporters who pursued the De Luna story and proved his innocence. De Luna's two sisters appear on the film. One is a leading advocate for ending the death penalty.

In a moving scene at his dining room table, with his two daughters and one son present, Pickett finally reveals how he came to view capital punishment after his being present at the death of 95 people. When asked what should be done with those who were convicted of capital crimes he says they should get life in solitary confinement, a fate far worse than death, especially in their view. This practice would also allow new evidence to spare their lives if they had been wrongly convicted. (We have a capital crime case in my county that is nationally known. After many years in prison new evidence showed clearly that the man convicted of a little girl's death did not commit the crime. He is now free while the real killer, who admitted the crime many years ago, is now on trial for it.)

So why did this film push me over the edge? The arguments made here are clear and emotionally compelling. Capital punishment does not allow for a change in decision, a change that is often called for in the light of new evidence. Second, it is the kind of end to life that many criminals desire. Third, it does not really prevent murder as many argue. Fourth, most of those put to death are poor, black or Hispanic, and were afforded no powerful defense in a court of law. Most importantly, the death penalty is unjustly administered in America and there is no good reason to believe that we can reform this practice in the foreseeable future. Finally, the appeal to Old Testament arguments do not hold up in the light of the way we unjustly administer the law or in the light of clearer New Testament principles. (This would require a book length article so I am not going to work this one out in a short blog.)

Whether you believe in capital punishment or not see At the Death House Door. You cannot be the same after you watch, I promise. If you have an ounce of compassion, mixed with your sense of the need for real justice, you will be moved and maybe even troubled. It is a powerful film that leaves you thinking long after you have seen it. The film has been nominated for the 2010 American Library video awards. I got it from my public library and would guess many readers could do the same.

Justice in America? The Failure of Our Prison System

Our prison system is an unmitigated disaster. Very few Christians know the real problems in the system and even less really care. This is positively wrong. We need to become advocates for justice and mercy in the very best sense of both words.

Our system is moving towards a serious collapse and few know the answers. An obvious problem can be seen in the simple, observable fact that those who have money generally avoid prison and those who are poor do not. But even worse is how we treat those who are incarcerated.

California has the largest penal system. This is no surprise since it is our most populous state. It is also one of the worst systems in America. The state has been building new prisons, since 1970, at a rate that is almost beyond belief. The entire system is so overcrowded and inhumane that a federal court recently ordered the state to reduce the prison population by one-third. The system is overcome by internal violence and the prisons are not correctional facilities in any meaningful sense of the word. They are, in reality, breeding grounds for worse behavior once prisoners are released. California even farms out over 20,000 inmates to other states!

But this is not simply a California problem. It is a national nightmare. 2.2 million people are in prison in the United States today and 13.5 million will pass through the prison system in some form this year! The cost to us is in excess of $60 billion. Lest you think this is a problem worldwide you need to know that we have more people in prison than any other Western nation, having passed even Russia in the past few years.

Some of you will think that this is all caused by our illegal immigration problem. Not so. Illegals are deported, at least in most cases. The reasons we have a huge problem range from drug use to tougher sentencing and parole laws, as well as the utterly shameful idea of "three strikes and you are out." (Minor criminals have been sentenced to life in prison under such laws and few people seem to realize it! Or a relatively petty "third" crime puts a person away for life.) This "three strikes" law is the result of harsh, unjust, over-reaction to the rising crime rate!

The Christian tradition has always labored to create humane conditions for prisoners. It has also rightly emphasized that imprisonment should work for rehabilitation in every possible case. Once a just sentence is served people should be given a new opportunity. And visiting and caring for those in prison has always been understood as a work of mercy by ethically minded Christians (cf. Matthew 25:36).

While prisons are clearly needed in every society a system that is cruel and unjust must be reformed. Warehousing inmates is not justice. It violates all sense of decency and mercy. The largest percentage of those who enter our system are not violent criminals, at least not initially. These nonviolent offenders must be corrected and helped. By the system we now have in place they are often raped, brutally mistreated and infected with all kinds of diseases. It has been estimated that 350,000 of our inmates suffer from "serious mental illness." (Only the simplest argue against the idea of mental illness.)

The bottom line here is a broad based lack of respect for human dignity. Christians rightly protest the "culture of death" that is associated with abortion. I wonder why so few of those same Christians do not protest the direct assault upon human dignity that is brought about by our horrible penal system. When man is inhumane to man the results impact us all. This is a "culture of life" issue.

The lack of regard for those who are warehoused in our prison system has a much greater impact on our total well-being than we know. It corrupts us all in ways we have never really thought about. We cannot afford to be ignorant about this any longer. We ought to make our voices heard in the corridors of power.

We need to begin by reforming sentencing guidelines, by developing better programs for helping prisoners re-enter society on the outside, and by providing a decent health care system inside prisons. We also need to make a serious effort to keep prisoners and families engaged with each other. More judges, cells and guards is not the answer! Building more prisons will not make us safer either.

I have studied revivals for almost forty years. In every experience of revival that I know about prisons have been directly impacted. I pray that God will touch your heart and mine to make us more aware of this problem and personally ready to respond as the Lord leads us within our own context. Having preached in prisons, and worked in prison ministry, I can tell you that the need is greater than ever and we are not solving it. Our record is so bad as a nation that we ought to be clamoring for change. And the church ought to care much more about this life issue than it does. What is your church doing about this problem? What are you doing?

Secular Humanists and Human Dignity

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker wrote an article that appeared in May in the magazine, The New Republic (TNR). I often disagree with TNR but I generally find it stimulating and provocative reading from a moderate to left-leaning perspective. It is one of those magazines that is not so far from reality that it can't still be genuinely worth reading. The current August 27 issue, for example, has an excellent article on Darfur and how it was allowed to happen. Conservatives desperately need the realism of this kind of journalism to challenge their comfortable categories about news.

Anyway, Professor Pinker assailed the 555-page report by the President's Council on Bioethics issued earlier this year. He called it "The Stupidity of Dignity." (Lest someone think only conservatives can come up with titles like this please note the pejorative nature of Pinker's title.) Pinker called human dignity a "slippery and ambiguous" concept brought into play by theological conservatives. He writes that they do this because they want to oppose stem-cell research on human embryos and human cloning. Pinker was particularly offended that several members of the President's Council served on the faculties of Catholic universities. And the chairman of the Council, Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, is the former president of Georgetown University and himself a longtime medical ethicist.

Pinker's polemics read like a rant. But he does make one fair point. Without Judeo-Christian ethics the meaning and basis for human dignity is hard to establish and getting harder by the day (cf. Psalms 8:5-7). The idea that human dignity is rooted in the creator-creature relationship is very old and clearly biblical. And the incarnation adds a unique aspect to this truth as well (Cf. Matthew 10:29-31).

Since secular humanists reject biblical authority they must seek a different foundation for their ethical arguments, a foundation like natural reason. Some can do it, with great difficulty. Others, like Pinker, have quit trying. Everyone needs to fear when the Pinkers of the world become the dominant voice and direction in human ethics.

This may seem far off, but while I was in California last week I listened to a great deal of National Public Radio (NPR). I heard an intriguing discussion with four people about the recent bombings of the homes of scientists at the University of California in Santa Cruz. These homes were targeted because these scientists are involved in laboratory research on animals (the animals being used were rats, mice and rabbits). The one person in the interview who represented the radical animal rights view argued that this attack was correct. He even suggested someday a human life will be taken to save animals. As I listened, I wondered to myself: "What makes us different from rats and mice if we are not made in the image of God?" Secular humanists like Steven Pinker will have a hard time answering that one with any kind of meaningful ethical response. So I admit it Dr. Pinker. My Christian faith does inform my ethics. In fact, it is the basis for my ethics.