Diann Rust-Tierney
Executive Director
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

As I write this today, the cherry blossoms are fading, but the machinery of death is lumbering along with renewed authority and conviction.

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled in Baze v. Rees that lethal injection posed no risk of unnecessary pain and suffering for the more than 3,200 who still face execution. It is ironic that while this decision was being announced, just a few blocks away people of faith in Washington, DC welcomed Pope Benedict XVI, who shares our belief that capital punishment is an affront to humanity and has no place in modern society.

At the same time that the Baze decision was being announced, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a second death penalty case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which challenges that state’s law that expands the death penalty to crimes other than murder.

Today we are reminded just how far we have to go in our fight to achieve abolition.

Those of us in the anti-death penalty movement know we have a tough, but lifesaving, task ahead. To end the death penalty we have to overturn capital punishment state by state.  I’d like to tell you what NCADP is doing to get us closer to abolition and why.

A new Harris poll confirms what we’ve all believed to be true – support for the death penalty in the United States is weakening. Fifty-two percent of Americans say the death penalty is no deterrent to murder. An astonishing 95% of those polled are convinced innocent people have already been convicted of murder. These figures are supported by earlier polls that indicate that three-quarters of Americans believe that an innocent person has already been executed in this country. Fifty-eight percent of recent respondents said they would oppose the death penalty based upon the knowledge that innocent people are sometimes convicted of murder.  

While the poll numbers are encouraging, we must do more to build the constituency for death penalty abolition across the nation. The stronger our movement is in America’s towns, cities and states, the more we can shape the public opinion that influences state legislators. Ultimately, they will respond if the voters say enough costly, state-sponsored killing is enough. And then we can rightly declare, “Mission accomplished.”

Most NCADP affiliates are small, headed by a few highly committed activists leading anywhere from a dozen to several thousand members. NCADP provides training, materials and advice that helps them build their membership, educate state legislators and encourage local citizens to shout out, “No!” to the death penalty.

Our immediate goal is to reduce the number of states with the death penalty from today’s 36. NCADP is uniquely experienced in waging these state battles – our staff includes veterans of the historic death penalty abolition victory in New Jersey as well as individuals who fought successfully to prevent capital punishment from being reintroduced in Wisconsin.

By Louisa Pyle
RH Reality Check

As recently as six or seven years ago, abortion was included in my medical school’s curriculum, but no longer. The comprehensive curriculum I naively expected that would provide medical students with the knowledge to meet the common needs of their female patients simply does not exist. At a party last weekend I asked a few second years, four twenty-three-year-old men, to report back to me if they hear the “A” word at any time this semester. They gleefully dubbed themselves the “Medical Student Moles for Choice.” Abortion is a shadow that wisps in and out of medicine, much like the quiet shadow of abortion in many women’s lives, not addressed directly, not discussed in coffee shops or over family dinner.

Medical school is, in many ways, a language school. Someone told me once that a medical student learns over 20,000 new words in their first two years of school, and in addition to the new vocabulary, I soon became capable of saying things over dinner that one should never say. “Rectum” no longer induces giggles and “vagina” is boring, not sexy or empowering. And yet, the word “abortion” is still said with a pause, a nod, a little quieter than the rest of the sentence. I’m happy when we talk about it at all: for me, the problem is the deafening silence. That a procedure more common than an appendectomy would never be named: In the halls of science and healthcare, that to me is an abomination.

At one time at my medical school, a state institution of strong reputation in the Deep South, the physician responsible for the classroom teaching in women’s reproductive health, “Dr. L,” included a full hour lecture on the medicine and science of abortion care in the OB/Gyn curriculum. She included her own stories of patients, the hooks on which we medical students hang all this physiology and chemistry in our overtaxed memories.

Even so, the students of this relatively conservative locale responded with powerfully reproachful marks on the course feedback forms. As student feedback influences not only the next year’s teaching of any course but also the tenure and performance assessment of the teachers, physicians, themselves, Dr. L. was forced to remove the lecture. During the following few years, including my turn with her, she managed to sneak in ten minutes on abortion safety when discussing contraception. “Abortion is safe,” was the message I heard, “but if you have a problem with it, you better be sure you know how to offer your patients appropriate birth control.”

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