death penalty
Not Caring about Guilt or Innocence: An Execution Case that Illustrates a Pattern
by Sarah Terzo On September 20, 2024, Freddie Owens was executed by lethal injection in South Carolina. A Retracted Testimony The state of South Carolina executed Owens, who took the name Khalil Allah while on death row, even though the chief witness against him retracted his testimony and now claims Allah was innocent. According to…
Ramiro Gonzales
by Sarah Terzo (published June 25, 2024) Nearly twenty years ago, Ramiro Gonzales was convicted of the murder of Bridget Townsend and sentenced to die. His execution is set for June 26, 2024. A Childhood Full of Abuse, Loss, and Suffering Ramiro is an abortion survivor. His father abandoned his sixteen-year-old mother when she…
The Safety of Incredibly Dangerous Things
by Rachel MacNair A common method used to try to justify violence is to make comparisons to innocent-sounding things, saying that the violence being justified is actually safer than things that people don’t normally fear much. Here are three examples Nuclear Weapons and Radiation In my youth, when we were opposing nuclear weapons as…
The Death Penalty and Abortion: Perspectives on Connections
Quotation collected by Rachel MacNair Helen Prejean Endorsing the book, Consistently Opposing Killing The societal wounds of racism, poverty, and a penchant for using violence to address problems are intimately connected to the death penalty, to war, to the killing of the old and demented, and to the killing of children, unborn and…
What Just Happened!?! Becoming Consistent Life Despite Myself. Part 1
by Thad Crouch There I am. Army infantry veteran and a Louisiana State Trooper scholarship recipient because I’m the criminal justice major with the highest GPA at McNeese State. It’s halfway through the spring semester. I’m staring at my raised hand, thinking, “What Just Happened!?!” The professor asked who was against the death penalty,…
Open Letter to Governor Stitt: the Pro-life Case against the Death Penalty
Dear Governor Stitt: As an organization, we at the Consistent Life Network have signed on to the letter calling on you to stop Oklahoma executions. The letter was sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Oklahoma, which was seeking many signatories. As a pro-life/pro-peace group, we strenuously object to the ACLU’s position on…
Death Penalty Jurisprudence of Former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Laura Denvir Stith
Author’s note: I recently retired from the Supreme Court of Missouri after serving as a judge of that court for 20 years. My brother, Richard Stith, a member of the Consistent Life Network, thought its members would be interested in learning about some of the death penalty decisions and dissents which I wrote while a…
The Death Penalty and Abortion: The Conservative/Liberal Straitjacket
by Rachel MacNair A freelance writer recently interviewed me on this question: Why is it that U.S. states tend to divide out, with some having the death penalty but passing restrictions on abortion, while others fund abortion and don’t have the death penalty? You can see the list here of death penalty states and abortion-funding…
My Ideas for 2021 Legislation
The 117th U.S. Congress started on January 3, 2021. Reminder: Opinions are those of the author and aren’t official for the Consistent Life Network as an organization. by Rachel MacNair My mind isn’t of the lobbying sort; my mind is of the conflict-resolution sort. This mainly means looking at the interests people have, rather…
Death Penalty and other Killing: The Destructive Effect on Us
by Fr. Jim Hewes I have opposed the death penalty for years. My reasoning stems from a larger perspective than just the death penalty. It focuses not on the circumstances surrounding the crime or the killer, but the effect of our actions on those that approve of or carry out an execution. Anguish In…