Pray for Tennessee

This Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning the State of Tennessee will execute two persons: Sedley Alley, whom I have blogged about in the past, and Paul Reid, who has been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. Regardless of the details of the men's individual cases, it saddens me that my state is willing to employ such a barbaric means of punishment.

As I have mentioned before, state-sponsored killing is very expensive and has not been shown to be a deterrent for violent crime. But my primary reason for opposing capital punishment was best articulated by Jesuit activist Alex Wiesendanger on the radio show I used to do: "To kill is to say, This person is beyond God¹s redemption. And no person, in my belief, ever has the right to say that."

The Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing has more:

Nashville: In the past forty-six years, the state of Tennessee has executed only one man. Now, in one day, it plans to execute two. Both Sedley Alley and Paul Dennis Reid are scheduled to die in the early morning of June 28th and both cases reveal critical flaws in Tennessee’s broken death penalty system.

“This double execution unquestionably reveals more flaws with Tennessee’s administration of the death penalty,” said Randy Tatel, Executive Director of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing (TCASK). “In the Alley case, we have a 20-year old unreliable conviction where the state is so afraid of the truth that it refuses to release physical evidence for DNA testing. In the case of Paul Reid, we are preparing to execute a severely mentally ill, delusional individual. It shows, yet again, that Tennessee’s death penalty system is broken.”