A Red State Is Finally Looking to the Pope for Death Penalty Guidance

Louisiana’s death penalty saga continues. Two steps forward, one step back, on the road toward abolition.

The latest step forward came last Wednesday, when Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards exercised his executive authority and ordered the state’s clemency board to hold hearings on the petitions filed by 56 death row inmates this summer. His order tees up the possibility that, before he leaves office next January, Edwards may be able to issue the largest mass commutation in this country since Illinois Gov. George Ryan emptied his state’s death row in 2003.

In a letter he sent to the clemency board explaining why he was issuing his order, Edwards offered a comprehensive account of the reasons why the death row inmates deserved a hearing and Louisiana’s death penalty should be ended.

In that letter and elsewhere, Edwards is charting a new path in the battle to end capital punishment. He is doing so by bringing together two different arguments, one of which has figured prominently in recent abolitionist efforts, the other of which has been less prominent.

The first is what elsewhere I have called “the new abolitionism.” It emphasizes problems in the administration of capital punishment as the reason to end it.

This line of argument is secularist. It requires no position on ultimate questions about the source of human dignity or the sanctity of life.

The second, “the old abolitionism,” frames the death penalty as an issue of morality and is unabashedly engaged with those questions. It is a position now most powerfully articulated by Pope Francis and the Catholic Church.

On Oct. 3, 2020, the pope issued an encyclical in which he rejected capital punishment. Among other things, it said that “Saint John Paul II stated clearly and firmly that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral standpoint and no longer necessary from that of penal justice.”

The pope continued: “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity. The firm rejection of the death penalty shows to what extent it is possible to recognize the inalienable dignity of every human being and to accept that he or she has a place in this universe.”

He concluded: “There can be no stepping back from this position. Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.”

Although the church’s position has been important in some instances, death penalty opponents in this country have made great progress by highlighting new abolitionism arguments and, in many cases, eschewing or downplaying the moral argument against capital punishment.

They have done so out of the belief that highlighting problems like false convictions, racism, and prosecutorial misconduct in capital cases is more effective in changing minds than trying to convince people that it is immoral, or a violation of God’s law, to sentence someone to death.

What Edwards is saying suggests that the American people may now be ready to listen to both kinds of arguments. And this may be especially true across the Bible Belt, where the death penalty is now most deeply entrenched

Before looking more closely at Edwards’ arguments, recall that the recent flurry of activity around the death penalty in Louisiana began in the spring, when the governor spoke out publicly against the death penalty for the first time. On that occasion, he offered his support for legislation to end it in his state.

In this speech, Edwards gave a preview of the arguments he made again in his Aug. 9 letter to the clemency board. He began by staking out a new abolitionist position and joining the major thrust of contemporary opposition to the death penalty.

He described capital punishment as “very final, not because it’s perfect, but because it ends in someone’s death, and we know that there are far more exonerations off of our death row over the last 20 years, than actual executions, which has been one.”

Edwards also said what many abolitionists don’t want to say out loud. “I also think,” he observed, that ending capital punishment is “very consistent with being a pro-life state.”

In late May, a little less than two months after Edwards unveiled his two-pronged attack on the death penalty, abolitionists in Louisiana, who had been energized by the governor’s support, suffered a setback after the Republican-controlled committee in the state House of Representatives voted 11–4 against the repeal bill.

This is the fifth time in the past six years that the Louisiana Legislature has rejected similar proposals.

In June, 56 of the state’s 60 death row inmates opened up a different avenue for Edwards when they filed petitions seeking clemency. But one month later, after receiving an advisory opinion from Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is running to replace the term-limited Edwards, the clemency board returned the petitions, claiming that they had not been filed in a timely manner.

Now, because of the governor’s action, the board will have to hold hearings on the merits of all those petitions.

In last Wednesday’s letter, Edwards attacked the attorney general directly. He argued that Landry “erroneously concluded that … [a] clemency application could only be filed within one year of the denial of a direct appeal” and explained that the attorney general wanted to treat people on death row “differently, and much more harshly, than a non-capital applicant in that the capital applicant would only have a limited, finite window, after having served a relatively short time in prison, within which to ask for a permanent reduction of his sentence. No such prescriptive period exists for non-capital applicants.”

The governor elaborated on things he said in March about the many serious problems with Louisiana’s death penalty system. As he had done then, Edwards focused on the fact that “actual innocence … has been proven far too often after imposition of the death penalty,” and that “over the last 20 years in Louisiana, there have been six exonerations and more than 50 reversals of sentences in capital cases.”

As a devout Catholic, Edwards went beyond such new abolitionist arguments. He made sure that the clemency board knew of his moral and spiritual opposition to capital punishment. “I am guided,” he wrote, “by my deep faith in taking my pro-life stance against the death penalty.”

Referring to those on Louisiana’s death row, he said, “The question is not whether these individuals should be set free, but whether a state-sanctioned execution meets the values of our pro-life state.”

The results of a 2022 Gallup poll suggest that there is a receptive audience for the kinds of moral arguments that Edwards is making about the death penalty. Gallup found that large numbers of Americans now share his conviction that the death penalty is never morally acceptable.

For opponents of capital punishment, Edwards has offered a distinctive template. In addition to highlighting injustices in the administration of the death penalty, it is now safe for them to say, full stop, that the death penalty is wrong in all cases.