Group hopes to end death penalty

When Marietta Jaeger Lane's youngest daughter was kidnapped from her tent during a family camping trip in Montana in 1973, Lane thought of the kidnapper and said "I could kill him with my bare hands and with a smile on my face."

But when the kidnapper called her exactly one year after abducting 7-year-old Susie Jaeger, molesting her and strangling her, Lane talked kindly to him for over an hour.

The man cried when Lane said she had been praying for him. That call and another led the FBI to find and arrest him. David Meirhofer confessed to murdering Susie and three other children. He hanged himself in his jail cell soon afterward.

"The foundation of my Catholic faith let me survive," Lane told about 300 people on Sunday at a National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty conference at Holiday Inn Harrisburg East in Swatara Twp. "God's idea of justice is not punishment but restoration. No matter how horrible this man was to my little girl, he was a son of God."

Lane joined John Carr of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Sister Helen Prejean, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book "Dead Man Walking," at a news conference launching the Catholic Mobilizing Network to End the Death Penalty.

That group will collaborate with established death penalty abolition organizations and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to inform the country's 67 million Roman Catholics about the moral and human reasons why capital punishment must be abolished, Carr said.

"We can't teach that killing is wrong by killing those who kill," Carr said. "We can't defend life by taking life. Every life is sacred."

The death penalty is on the books in 36 states, including Pennsylvania, which has 228 inmates on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. Use of the death penalty peaked nationally in 1999 with 98 executions. Last year, there were 37 executions nationally.

In 1981, Prejean became spiritual adviser to Patrick Sonnier, sentenced to die in Louisiana for murdering two teenagers. As she came to know Sonnier, other death row inmates and the families of murder victims, Prejean realized that the death penalty is inhumane, unjust, arbitrary and racist, and generally applied to those who are too poor to afford decent legal counsel.

Her life changed when she accompanied Sonnier to his death. Prejean said that capital punishment erodes society's moral foundation.

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