The Center’s last Religion in the News lunch for this academic year took place on Tuesday, April 28: “Inflicting Death: Should the State Execute Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?” It was a sad but timely event, since it occurred just after the second anniversary of the Marathon bombing and during the sentencing phase of Mr. Tsarnaev’s trial. As usual with these quickly scheduled conversations, there was no expert in the room.
As usual, though, I got us going, by some opening reflections meant to survey the topic and set the stage. The participants — around 20 of us from around the university and the local community — discussed the trial and particular case, but also the larger issues related to violence, state-sanctioned killing, and comparisons between European and American views on the death penalty. We considered too the often unreflectively posed alternative, life imprisonment without parole, and the harshness connected with many decades in prison, much of the time in solitary confinement. Finally, we also delved now and then into various religious views of state-sanctioned killing, Hindu and Buddhist, Jewish and Christian, for example.
It is not surprising that in the Divinity School community, in Cambridge and at Harvard, there was a strong sentiment in the room against the death penalty in the Tsarnaev case and, to a large extent, in any case. Yet we also did not give ourselves an easy time. Several among us pushed back, arguing that the death penalty is necessary and on occasion justified – not as venegeance, but as a proportionate response to the malicious and intention taking of life.
Others highlighted the necessity of getting beyond this one issue — of a broader commitment to life, from conception to death: life must habitually be respected as inviolable at every moment, if it is to be respected robustly at any particular stage. Similarly, the ruling out of state-sanctioned violence in executions has more force, surely, if we commit ourselves to ending the systemic violence of declared and de facto wars and the possession of weapons of mass destruction.
As usual, this lunchtime discussion ended, after 75 minutes or so, without any clear resolution. But wherever we stood on the spectrum of opinions when we arrived at lunch, the strengths and weaknesses of our views were all the clearer and sharper at the end.
Religion in the News lunches will begin again in September. There are usually three or four each semester. They are open to the wider community, and we welcome suggestions for topics.
—by Francis X. Clooney, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions