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Faith leaders and organizations representing a variety of faiths have spoken in opposition to the death penalty, often calling upon their innate beliefs in human dignity and redemption.

The Death Penalty Information Center has compiled statements from a broad array of faith leaders, highlights the views of those speaking from a faith perspective when the comments relate to a case or controversy involving capital punishment, and features the results of death penalty polls when broken down by particular faiths.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty has gathered statements opposition to capital punishment from leaders of faith, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

CHRISTIANITY

Minister Chazle’ Woodley shares her sermon, Faith & the Death Penalty: Through the Eyes of Jesus.

In 2018, Pope Francis declared the death penalty wrong in all cases, a definitive change in church teaching. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Today … there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state.  Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.

Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”, and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.

See Equal Justice USA’s Evangelical Network:

We are Evangelicals and we recognize that every person is created in the image of God, and therefore all life has immeasurable value. We believe that our justice system should reflect this truth, and that every individual should be treated with respect and dignity.

Our current justice system, and our responses to violence in particular, have not lived up to this vision and instead have delivered further pain and harm to communities. We need new responses to violence that address trauma, advance racial equity, and fulfill the promise of healing, safety, and restoration for all.

Check out Sister Helen Prejean and the Ministry Against the Death Penalty:

The movement to abolish the death penalty needs the religious community because the heart of religion is about compassion, human rights, and the indivisible dignity of each human person made in the image of God.

See Baptist Theologian Roger E Olson on Why Authentic Christians Must Oppose the Death Penalty:

When we take another human life unnecessarily, we usurp God’s prerogative for that person’s eventual salvation or, if they are already saved, for that person’s future service for the Kingdom of God.

For this reason alone, if for no other, Christians must oppose capital punishment. How we oppose it is another question. I know that if I lived anywhere near this state’s death chamber I would join the few opponents of capital punishment that routinely gather for a prayer vigil, often with signs expressing opposition to the death penalty, on the days when prisoners are to be executed.

See the United Methodist Church:

We worship a God who received the death penalty. Jesus was tried, sentenced, and murdered by the state. He died on a cross on a hill between two criminals.

That cross was the symbol of the oppressive power the Roman state. It was the tool the Romans used to keep the population in line. The cross on a hill said, “behave, or you will end up here.”

Jesus took that cross. He died and was buried. On the third day, he rose from the dead. The empty tomb is a God’s proclamation that love and grace triumph over oppression and death.

Christ’s resurrection is a rejection of all that the cross represented.

ISLAM

From the NCADP:

If you do stretch your hand against me to kill me, I shall never stretch my hand against you to kill you, I will not commit the same evil act that you threaten to commit, so that I will not earn the same sin as you, for I fear Allah; the Lord of the all that exists.

-Qur’an, 5:28 (Islamic Holy Book)

The story of Cain and Abel in the Qur’an includes a dialogue between the two brothers. After Cain threatens to take Abel’s life, the latter refuses to inflict harm in self-defense. Abel did not want to shed blood, thereby destroying a life created by God and defiling the divine creation.

JUDAISM

From the NCADP:

It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.

– Sefer Hamitzvot (Book of the Commandments)

This quote by Moses Maimonides, the great 12th-century Jewish rabbi and scholar, expresses a key element found in most religious traditions – that innocent life has immense intrinsic value. It is far too risky to have capital punishment because of the very real likelihood of executing an innocent person. Such a possibility is anathema to people of faith and others of goodwill.

See The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism:

Since 1959, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) and the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) have formally opposed the death penalty.

The CCAR resolved in 1979 that “both in concept and in practice, Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant” and there is no persuasive evidence “that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime.”

The URJ notes that: “We believe that there is no crime for which the taking of human life by society is justified, and that it is the obligation of society to evolve other methods in dealing with crime. We appeal to our congregants and to our co-religionists and to all who cherish God’s mercy and love to join in efforts to eliminate this practice [of capital punishment] which lies as a stain upon civilization and our religious conscience.”

BUDDHISM

Andre is a practicing Buddhist, and was already teaching meditation and anger management to incarcerated men at Nash Correctional when his son, Peace, was murdered. Losing Peace, he said, makes him even more dedicated to his practice and his teaching.

Some people are still living their loss after seven years, twenty years—they still can’t let it go. What can you do? There is nothing I can do or say. People hear my story of forgiveness, but they don’t see how they could get there or even if they should get there. I thought my daughter would be angry at me for forgiving her brother’s killer but, after a time, she told her mom, I’m not mad at Dad. I am just angry at myself because I can’t get there. You do question yourself and ask, What is wrong with me? Is it because I do not love my son? It is not an easy path.

Learn more about Andre and his work at the Kadampa Center here.

From the NCADP:

Everyone fears punishment; everyone fears death, just as you do. Therefore you do not kill or cause to be killed.

-Dhammapada 10:124 (Teachings of the Buddha)

We are all connected. We oppose the death penalty because you cannot kill the murder without causing a ripple effect of pain that goes beyond the prisoner to his or her family, corrections employees and their families and the community. And the focus on killing the killer detracts focus and resources away from the true work of healing devastated families and our communities.

People of faith must help lead the effort to end capital punishment. Moral force, combined with pragmatic leadership is what it will take to end the death penalty.

UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS

See the Unitarian Universalists Association’s Case Against the Death Penalty

And in the 1974 Unitarian Universalist’s General Resolution:

WHEREAS, at this time, even though there has been no execution in the United States for the past seven years, twenty-eight states have already passed legislation seeking to re-establish capital punishment; and

WHEREAS, the act of execution of the death penalty by government sets an example of violence;

BE IT RESOLVED: That the 1974 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association continues to oppose the death penalty in the United States and Canada, and urges all Unitarian Universalists and their local churches and fellowships to oppose any attempts to restore or continue it in any form.

Our current criminal legal system offers only one remedy when a crime has been committed: punishment. With the largest prison population in the world, the United States spends billions of dollars each year imprisoning and executing people. In North Carolina alone, about 66,000 adults are in prison or jail. And as much as the punishment system pays lip service to the victims of crime, it often ignores the central questions that might help create healing for people harmed by crime, their communities, and even the people who harmed them. But there is an alternative.

Who has been harmed?
Why did it happen?
What would help to repair the harm?
How can we make sure this doesn’t happen again?

These are the questions asked by restorative justice, a growing movement that seeks alternatives to the punishment-only model. Restorative justice sees a crime as more than breaking the law; it’s an action that harms relationships and communities. The restorative justice process empowers those who are most affected by crime to have a voice in how that harm should be repaired. It promotes carefully facilitated dialogues that often result in transformation for both those harmed and those who committed crimes. The process typically ends with concrete steps the offender must take to make amends, tailored to the specific crime, its victims, and the community in which it happened. In other cases, it is used after the fact to help victims and offenders understand and heal from the trauma of the crime.

Right now, restorative justice is used in some North Carolina school districts — including Wake, Durham, and Chapel Hill — to keep children out of the criminal punishment system. A few North Carolina district attorneys have also begun to use restorative justice alongside the traditional legal process. In some cases, it has helped people take responsibility for their crimes while avoiding long prison terms, which are costly not just for incarcerated individuals but for their families, their communities, and the state. It might be tempting to think of restorative justice as a way for people to get off easy, but those familiar with the process say it makes far more demands on a person than the typical criminal legal system, where defendants passively receive punishment from a faceless system. In the criminal process, defendants sometimes come to feel like victims of a flawed system and avoid the difficult emotional work of taking responsibility for their behavior. By contrast, facing the people they harmed is a grueling process that forces them to reckon with the pain they’ve caused, accept responsibility, and participate in the community’s healing.

On North Carolina’s death row, some of the men have participated in restorative justice circles that allowed them to hear the stories of people who lost loved ones to violence. The circles encouraged them to explore the roots of their own crimes. Some people on death row say the process was life-changing, forcing them to understand the pain they caused in new ways. However, at present, only a tiny fraction of prisoners and victim family members are able to access a restorative justice process.

We envision a world in which the key questions of restorative justice are asked in every crime, especially in serious crimes that cause the most harm. We envision a system where families of murder victims have a voice in their own healing, rather than being told by the state that the death penalty will bring them “closure.” We envision a society that seeks to understand the causes and conditions of crime, and then implements evidence-based solutions to reduce its frequency. We envision a state whose response to crime is: How can we help to heal? Instead of: Who can we execute?

A LETTER TO LYNDA

In October 2019, Jason Hurst wrote a heart-felt letter recalling Lynda Simmons, a woman who had shared with men on death row her powerful story of loss and restoration. This is an excerpt from that letter, published with generous permission from both Lynda and Jason.

“I would like to say that I had a full understanding of the pain I caused immediately after committing the atrocity that sent me here, but the truth is, I had no idea. At least not until my participation in the circle group and having the privilege to meet Lynda Simmons. A courageous, forgiving, amazing person, Lynda shared with us how the murder of her son completely changed her life. There was not a dry eye among us and it was then that the destruction my actions had caused began to be clear. It was as if each of us in the room were responsible for the loss of her son and we wanted to be forgiven for it.

Over a period of several weeks, she listened as each of us told her as much or as little about what brought us here as we were comfortable with, all the while offering us comfort while surely reliving the worst day of her life. That whole moving experience opened up the idea that maybe the possibility exists for me to express how remorseful I am to the family whose lives I’ve forever altered. To assure them that not only am I physically incarcerated, but after being granted a view into Lynda Simmons’ life, I hurt internally for what I’ve done as well. I want them to know that.”

Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were intellectually disabled teenagers when they were taken from their home in rural Robeson County, coerced into confessing to a brutal murder they didn’t commit, and sentenced to death. The brothers spent 31 years in prison before DNA testing finally proved them innocent. By the time of their release in 2014, Henry was North Carolina’s longest serving death row prisoner.

[Read more stories of innocent people sentenced to death in North Carolina]

Henry McCollum lived in New Jersey but had come to rural North Carolina to spend time with his mother and his brother, Leon Brown. It was the autumn of 1983. Henry was 19, and Leon was just 15. Henry had been in Robeson County for a few weeks when the body of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie was discovered in a soybean field just a short distance away from his mother’s home. The little girl been raped, and suffocated. Police in the tiny town of Red Springs began interviewing local residents, searching for suspects.

One police officer came across a high school student who repeated a rumor she’d heard at school: Henry McCollum, a teen from out of town, seemed suspicious and might have been involved in the crime. Henry had intellectual disabilities, which may have been why other teens felt he behaved strangely. When officers showed up at his mother’s house, Henry went to the police station voluntarily. It was evening, and a group of law enforcement officers kept him in an interrogation room until late in the night, demanding that Henry tell them about the crime, promising him that if he gave them the facts about the crime, he would be allowed to go home. After four and a half hours of questioning, Henry broke. He told the officers a story filled with details they’d given him, about a rape and murder he had nothing to do with. The officers wrote up a grisly confession and Henry, who could barely comprehend the written document, signed it. And then he asked, “Can I go home now?” He had no idea that he wouldn’t go home again for more than three decades.

As Henry invented the details of the rape, he added other characters to the scene to share responsibility for the awful crime. He said that his brother Leon had been with him, along with two friends. By coincidence, Leon and his mother were already at the police station; they’d come to wait for Henry. Police pulled Leon into another interrogation room, and extracted a confession from him too. Leon, who was more profoundly disabled than Henry, could not even read the document he signed just a half hour after Henry’s confession. It conflicted in significant ways with Henry’s account, and both confessions pointed to two other boys who police later determined could not possibly have been present. Yet, those two confessions — coerced, conflicting, and patently false — became the evidence that prosecutors would use to send two innocent, poor, black, disabled teenagers to death row.

Henry and Leon quickly retracted their confessions, but it was too late. In 1984, a jury sentenced both of them to death. In 1991, they won a new trial, and Leon was resentenced to life in prison. However, Henry was again sentenced to death. His confession was, once again, the key piece of evidence. During his years on death row, Henry’s case became notorious. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia pointed to the brutality of Henry’s crime as a reason to support capital punishment. During North Carolina legislative elections in 2010, Henry’s face showed up on political flyers as an example of a brutal rapist and child killer who deserved to be executed. Henry continued to proclaim his innocence to anyone who would listen.

Finally, Leon wrote to the N.C. Innocence Commission, a state agency that agreed to investigate the case. What they uncovered was shocking. Investigators knew at the time that fingerprints found at the scene didn’t match Henry or Leon, but they never compared the fingerprints to other possible suspects. And just a few weeks after Sabrina Buie’s killing, another young woman was raped and murdered in Red Springs. Joann Brockman, 18, had also been raped, asphyxiated, and left in a field. The culprit was a man named Roscoe Artis, who had a long record of serious assaults against women. Artis lived next to the field where Sabrina’s body was found, yet he had never been investigated as a suspect in her death. The Innocence Commission staff unearthed items that had been left by Sabrina’s body — clothing, beer cans, cigarette butts — and conducted modern DNA testing. They found no DNA belonging to Henry and Leon, but on one cigarette butt, they found a perfect match with Roscoe Artis.

Based on the Commission’s overwhelming evidence of innocence, the brothers were released from prison in 2014. In 2015, then-Gov. Pat McCrory granted the brothers a full pardon of innocence. Also that year, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer cited their case as a reason to outlaw the death penalty.

Today, Henry is rebuilding his life with the help of family. Leon, whose severe disabilities were compounded by the trauma of prison, is living in an institution. Both are pursuing a civil lawsuit against the agencies that wrongly imprisoned them. Roscoe Artis remains in prison, serving a life sentence for Brockman’s murder. He has not been prosecuted for Sabrina’s murder.

Because of a single juror, Darryl Hunt was spared the death penalty for a rape and murder he did not commit. He was not spared, however, from spending 19 years in prison — ten of those after DNA evidence showed that he was not the culprit.

[Read more stories of innocent people sentenced to death in North Carolina]

In August 1984, Darryl Hunt was an impoverished teenager in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when police scooped him up and put him into a lineup for a crime he did not commit. A 25-year-old newspaper copy editor, Deborah Sykes, had been raped and stabbed to death while on her way to work. The killing of a young white woman sparked community outrage, and police were eager to make an arrest. A witness came forward to say he’d seen Ms. Sykes with a black man on the morning of the crime. Police created a lineup, and the witness picked Darryl. We now know that police lineups often lead to mistaken identifications and wrongful convictions. In Darryl’s case, that mistaken identification was the beginning of a saga that would lead to two decades in prison and then two decades of activism, fighting the system that had wrongly imprisoned him and so many others.

At his 1985 trial, the main evidence tying Darryl to the crime was the mistaken testimony of people who said they had seen him on the morning of the murder with Sykes or at a hotel disposing of bloody towels. Their identification of Darryl was shaky at best. Another witness, Darryl’s girlfriend, claimed he had confessed to her. She was facing her own prosecution on larceny charges and likely hoped that her testimony in Darryl’s case would result in lighter punishment. Later, she recanted her testimony against Darryl. Darryl testified that he did not know Deborah Sykes and had no involvement with the crime. Darryl was sentenced to life in prison, because of that single juror who refused to make it a unanimous vote for death.

In 1989, Darryl’s conviction was overturned because prosecutors had relied on the girlfriend’s since-recanted statements. Prosecutors offered Darryl a deal. He could be freed by pleading guilty and accepting a sentence of the five years he had already served. He refused to admit to a crime he did not commit. Darryl was retried for murder, and again sentenced to life in prison.

In 1994, scientific advances allowed for DNA testing, which revealed that the DNA of the rapist did not match Darryl’s. In a hearing about the newly discovered DNA, the state changed its story, now insisting that there was more than one assailant and that Darryl killed the victim while another man raped her. The judge ruled in the prosecution’s favor, saying the DNA evidence did not prove his innocence. Darryl remained in prison for another decade.

In 2004, after immense public pressure, the state finally ran the crime scene DNA through a database of people convicted of felonies and found a perfect match — a man who had committed a similar rape just months after Deborah Sykes’ murder. Willard Brown confessed, and Darryl was finally freed. That same year, Darryl received a rare pardon of innocence from the governor.

Darryl spent 19 years in prison after a conviction based on mistaken identification and recanted testimony.

Darryl spent 15 years in prison after his conviction was overturned and he refused a plea deal that would have allowed him to go home.

Darryl spent 10 years in prison after DNA evidence proved he had not assaulted Ms. Sykes.

Between his date of conviction and date of exoneration, 29 people were executed in North Carolina.

Darryl spent the rest of his life advocating to end capital punishment and ensure that no more innocent people get the death penalty in North Carolina. “If I had gotten a death sentence,” he said, “there’s no doubt in my mind I would have been executed.” He founded the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advocating for the wrongfully convicted supporting people recently released from prison.

In a loss to us all, Darryl died in 2016. He was 51.

Learn more:

Watch the fascinating documentary about Darryl’s 19-year fight for freedom, The Trials of Darryl Hunt

Read a moving piece by Mark Rabil, the lawyer who represented Darryl for 20 years, My Three Decades with Darryl Hunt

Read this beautiful story about the end of Darryl’s life, written by his longtime friend, The Last Days of Darryl Hunt

Read an investigative series about Darryl’s case in the Winston-Salem Journal

See more stories of innocent people sentenced to death in North Carolina