A group of more than 100 rab­bis from mul­ti­ple Jewish denom­i­na­tions have issued a state­ment express­ing their oppo­si­tion to the use of the death penal­ty in the United States. The state­ment, post­ed by Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz (pic­tured) in Forward.com’s Scribe—a curat­ed con­trib­u­tor net­work of Jewish thought — called for an end to the ​“cru­el prac­tice” of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and ​“for the begin­ning of a new par­a­digm of fair, equi­table restora­tive jus­tice.” The rab­bis said that “[a]s Jews and cit­i­zens, we believe that gov­ern­ments must pro­tect the dig­ni­ty and rights of every human being. By using the death penal­ty, our coun­try fails to live up to this basic require­ment.” The rab­bis invoked clas­si­cal Jewish thought that, “[w]hile not cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly opposed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, … saw the death penal­ty as so extreme a mea­sure that they all but removed it from their sys­tem of jus­tice.” The Sages, they wrote, ​“had a very high bar for reli­able evi­dence, were eager to find ways to acquit, and were deeply con­cerned about the dig­ni­ty of [the] con­demned. In con­trast, our American sys­tem today lacks the high­est safe­guards to pro­tect the lives of the inno­cent and uses cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment all too read­i­ly.” The rab­bis crit­i­cized the unre­li­a­bil­i­ty, unfair­ness, and cost­li­ness of the death penal­ty as admin­is­tered across the U.S., exac­er­bat­ed by a defendant’s pover­ty or ​“lack of access to legal resources.” ​“The con­se­quences of this sys­tem,” they wrote, ​“are not only fun­da­men­tal­ly unjust but also pro­duce racial­ly dis­parate out­comes.” They also expressed con­cerned about the sys­tem send­ing inno­cent peo­ple to death row: ​“too often,” they said, ​“the wrong per­son is con­vict­ed …. We do not naive­ly believe that every­one on death row is com­plete­ly inno­cent of any crime. Yet, it is time to see the death penal­ty for what it is: not as jus­tice gone awry, but a symp­tom of injus­tice as status quo.”

(S. Yanklowitz, ​“Over 100 Rabbi’s Denounce The Death Penalty,” The Forward, August 10, 2017.) See Religion and New Voices.

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