Conservatives make case against death penalty
Caroline MolloyConservatives should oppose capital punishment because it violates pro-life values and the principles of more transparent and limited government, death penalty abolitionists said during a recent panel discussion.
“Do we trust the government to deliver our mail on time? I think I can answer that — the answer’s no,” said Demetrius Minor, executive director of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a national network of social and political conservatives opposed to government executions.
“Do we trust the government to give us health insurance? I think I can answer that — the answer’s no. Do we trust the government to tell us what’s in the Epstein files? I think I can answer that — the answer’s no.”
And if the government can’t be trusted on those and other important issues, it should not be granted the power over life and death, Minor said. “The death penalty is the total opposite of small and limited and the way it’s administered and its cost and how it is used, that is not small and limited government. It is not a conservative policy.”
Minor spoke as a panelist during “Defending Life: A Pro-Life Perspective on the Death Penalty,” a virtual discussion hosted recently by Tennessee Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. He was joined in the conversation by Adam Luck, former chair of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board and senior adviser to Oklahoma Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
“The death penalty actually devalues innocent life,” said Luck, who resigned from the state’s parole board in 2022 at the request of Gov. Kevin Stitt over a disagreement about the morality and validity of capital punishment.
“If you really get down to the base level and you agree that we will never be able to guarantee we don’t execute an innocent person, and that the risk of killing an innocent person is an inherent part of the system, then you’re making your peace with taking innocent life if you support the death penalty,” he said.
Luck said he wrestled with the issue for years and eventually was swayed against the death penalty by his time on the parole board and by a 2017 bipartisan report that found Oklahoma’s system to be deeply flawed. He’s also seen how states have consistently demonstrated the inability to administer capital punishment in ways that are consistently fair and just, a fact that should be alarming to conservatives concerned about fiscal and pro-life matters.
