CNS STORY: Doctors' role in executions part of new tactic against death penalty

DEATH-LUNDY Feb-4-2009 (640 words) With photo. xxxn

Doctors' role in executions part of new tactic against death penalty

By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A national organization founded by Sister Helen Prejean and headed by a Jesuit priest is trying a new tactic to end use of the death penalty, state by state.

The Moratorium Campaign, based at the Martin Luther King Jr. Catholic Student Center at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., hopes to convince physician licensing boards or medical societies in each state to declare it unethical for doctors to participate in executions, thus making it impossible for states to carry out their own protocols for capital punishment.

"That's what we'll be focusing on for the next 12 months," said Jesuit Father George F. Lundy, director of the campaign and pastor of the campus center, in a telephone interview from Baton Rouge. "The issue is grabbing people."

The effort will focus especially on the Southern states, where 95 percent of all U.S. executions took place in 2008, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

"A lot of death penalty work in recent years has focused on governors and legislatures," Father Lundy said. Fourteen states do not currently allow the death penalty and others are "close to abolition," he added.

But a different strategy was needed "to transcend Southern politics," the Jesuit said. "We wanted to make it a professional issue instead of a political one."

The American Medical Association's Code of Medical Ethics says that, although one's opinion on capital punishment is a "personal moral decision," a physician "should not be a participant in a legally authorized execution" since the profession is "dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so."

The national code is not legally binding, however, and physicians around the country are awaiting a decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court on whether the state medical board, which licenses and disciplines physicians, can bar doctors from doing anything more than being present at lethal injections.

The issue also represents something of a rebirth of the Moratorium Campaign, which death penalty activist Sister Helen, a Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille, founded around 2000 to collect signatures calling for an international moratorium on the use of capital punishment.

In its early years the campaign collected 2.5 million signatures on petitions against the death penalty, which were presented to the U.N. General Assembly and other international gatherings.

"But over time the campaign got to be heavily staffed and kind of expensive," Father Lundy said. "So in late 2004, we decided to mothball it."

But activities designed to raise awareness about capital punishment have continued. Each of the 28 Jesuit universities and 50 Jesuit high schools nationwide were encouraged to present the play "Dead Man Walking," written by actor Tim Robbins in 2002 from the book and movie detailing Sister Helen's experiences with two men on death row.

In the first year of a pilot project, the play was performed at one-third of the Jesuit colleges and a quarter of the high schools, Father Lundy said. Many more schools have staged the play in subsequent years, raising consciousness about the death penalty issue among young people.

The Moratorium Campaign also is working to develop "a more nimble database," the priest said. Although the campaign's old database included some 3.5 million contacts, many were outdated and useless, he said.

A new database of about 20,000 current contacts gives the campaign the opportunity to get quick action when needed in a particular state or on a specific issue, he added.

Father Lundy's involvement in the death penalty issue long predates the Moratorium Campaign. In the early 1980s, while living in Chicago, he was recruited to serve as an "ethics witness" in the sentencing phase of capital punishment cases.

He met Sister Helen shortly thereafter "and we've grown old together," he said with a laugh.

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