Conservatives 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.
Demetrius Minor
“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.
Adam Luck
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.
Oklahoma has “a terrible track record with carrying out executions with any level of competence” and the state has yet to implement even one of the 46 measures recommended by a special death penalty commission a decade ago, he noted.
“I’m not coming to the conversation in a way where I can be simply dismissed. I did this for three years on behalf of the state. I reviewed tens of thousands of cases, and I voted on the lives of five other human beings.”
Minor said it was his quest for “a holistic view of being pro-life” that led him as a conservative and a Christian to become a death penalty abolitionist.
“I’m reminded of a Scripture in Proverbs 6 where it talks about the seven things that are abominable to the Lord, and one of them says, ‘hands that shed innocent blood.’ That means if the government executes an innocent person, my faith tells me that is an abomination and that’s not something that I’m comfortable living with or that I’m comfortable endorsing.”
Minor urged death penalty opponents to confront conservative lawmakers about the exorbitant costs of capital trials and appeals and about the emotional ordeal the system imposes on victims’ families.
“All it does is recycle that pain and that trauma. What the death penalty does is transfer pain from one family to another, and that’s just something that I’m not comfortable endorsing.”
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