King’s Daughter Says Death Penalty Perpetuates Cycle of Violence

Bernice King, the youngest daugh­ter of Martin Luther King, Jr., encour­aged New Hampshire to repeal the death penal­ty, say­ing that even though she lost her father and grand­moth­er to mur­der, ​“I can’t accept the judg­ment that killers need to be killed, a prac­tice that mere­ly per­pet­u­ates the cycle of vio­lence.” She called the death penal­ty ​“unwor­thy of a civ­i­lized soci­ety,” and warned that ​“ret­ri­bu­tion can­not light the way to the gen­uine heal­ing that we need in the wake of heinous acts of vio­lence.” She also point­ed to the num­ber of peo­ple freed from death row after being exon­er­at­ed as ​“evi­dence that mis­takes can and do get made in a jus­tice sys­tem run by fal­li­ble human beings.” She invoked her father’s mes­sage of non­vi­o­lence, quot­ing from his Nobel Prize accep­tance speech, “‘Nonviolence is the answer to the cru­cial polit­i­cal and moral ques­tions of our time: the need for man to over­come oppres­sion and vio­lence with­out resort­ing to oppres­sion and vio­lence.’ ” Read her op-ed below.

Another View — Bernice A. King: NH can create a better world by ending state-sanctioned killing

by BERNICE A. KING 

Having lost my father and my grand­moth­er to homi­cide, I can well under­stand the hurt, anger and frus­tra­tion that lead some peo­ple to sup­port the death penal­ty. Yet I can’t accept the judg­ment that killers need to be killed, a prac­tice that mere­ly per­pet­u­ates the cycle of violence.

Yes, we want to see truth and jus­tice pre­vail. But ret­ri­bu­tion can­not light the way to the gen­uine heal­ing that we need in the wake of heinous acts of vio­lence. Instead, state-spon­sored killing sets a dehu­man­iz­ing exam­ple of bru­tal­i­ty that encour­ages more violence.

Allowing the state to kill its cit­i­zens for any rea­son dimin­ish­es our human­i­ty and sets a sadis­tic and dan­ger­ous prece­dent that is unwor­thy of a civ­i­lized soci­ety. Every exe­cu­tion makes our com­mu­ni­ty a lit­tle less humane and car­ries us fur­ther from achiev­ing a peace­ful soci­ety in which we can all take pride.

There are oth­er rea­sons, as well, to move beyond the death penalty.

Legal schol­ars from three uni­ver­si­ties recent­ly sur­veyed stud­ies of racial dis­par­i­ties in the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and observed: ​“The most con­sis­tent and robust find­ing in this lit­er­a­ture is that even after con­trol­ling for dozens and some­times hun­dreds of case-relat­ed vari­ables, Americans who mur­der Whites are more like­ly to receive a death sen­tence than those who murder Blacks.”

We can­not get around the evi­dence that our nation’s appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty is racially charged.

Nor can we avoid the fact that inno­cent peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death. That 143 peo­ple have been exon­er­at­ed and released from death row since 1973 is evi­dence that mis­takes can and do get made in a jus­tice sys­tem run by fal­li­ble human beings. Surely we must hold our judi­cial sys­tem to a high­er stan­dard than one which allows an irre­versible mis­car­riage of jus­tice to occur.

My father, Martin Luther King Jr., always preached that evil must be coun­ter­act­ed with love, even in response to extreme vio­lence. As he said in his Nobel Prize accep­tance speech, ​“Nonviolence is the answer to the cru­cial polit­i­cal and moral ques­tions of our time: the need for man to over­come oppres­sion and vio­lence with­out resort­ing to oppres­sion and vio­lence. Man must evolve for all human con­flict a method which rejects revenge, aggres­sion and retal­i­a­tion.” Surely there is no place for the death penal­ty in the world he dreamed of.

My moth­er, too, was a staunch death penal­ty oppo­nent. ​“Although I have suf­fered the loss of two fam­i­ly mem­bers by assas­si­na­tion,” she wrote, ​“I remain firm­ly and unequiv­o­cal­ly opposed to the death penal­ty for those con­vict­ed of cap­i­tal offens­es. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retal­i­a­tion. Justice is nev­er advanced in the tak­ing of a human life. Morality is nev­er upheld by legalized murder.”

New Hampshire, the last state to declare a hol­i­day in my father’s hon­or, can be the next state to repeal the death penal­ty and bring us clos­er to ​“the beloved com­mu­ni­ty” of which he dreamed.

- — - — -

Bernice A. King, the youngest daugh­ter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, is an ordained min­is­ter, attor­ney and the CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

(B. King, ​“Another View — Bernice A. King: NH can cre­ate a bet­ter world by end­ing state-sanc­tioned killing,” New Hampshire Union Leader, op-ed, January 17, 2014). See Religion and Recent Legislation. New Hampshire con­duct­ed leg­isla­tive hear­ings on January 16 on a bill to repeal the death penalty.