Texas Baptists back death-penalty stay

About the time when outgoing Illinois Governor George Ryan emptied death row with commuted or reduced sentences, an ethics arm of the 4-million-member Baptist General Convention of Texas joined the call for a moratorium on capital punishment.

The Christian Life Commission of the moderate Southern Baptist convention in Texas also agreed to support legislation that would allow Texas juries to choose life without parole as an alternative to the death penalty. Since 1976, Texas has carried out about one third of the executions in the U.S. Last year, 33 of the 71 executions in the country were performed in Texas.

The agency approved an extensive report examining capital punishment from biblical, historical and social-justice perspectives. The report concludes that "in the final analysis, biblical teaching does not support capital punishment as it is practiced in contemporary society."

Ryan, a Republican, called the death-penalty system as "arbitrary as one who gets hit by a bolt of lightning." Though the release of the Baptist report was not clearly tied to the Illinois governor's earlier moratorium and 11th-hour decisions, the report reflected a similar perspective: "The practice of capital punishment in our nation and state is an affront to biblical justice, both in terms of its impact on the marginalized in society and in terms of simple fairness. How can we perpetuate a system which is clearly so unfair and so broken?"

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