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Posted on 07/06/2026 6:53:20 AM PDT by Ahithophel
In her first years attending a fast marking the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that resumed the modern-day death penalty in the United States, SueZann Bosler was still on medication to treat the effects of being stabbed in the head by the same man who murdered her father, the Rev. Bill Bosler, in 1986.
To honor the wishes of her father — a Church of the Brethren minister in Florida who was against the death penalty — Bosler worked for a decade to commute the death sentence of the man who killed her father and injured her, despite initially struggling to forgive him. “ It saved my life, forgiveness,” she said.
On Thursday (July 2), the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Gregg v. Georgia decision that reignited the modern era of the death penalty in the country, Bosler is on her fourth day of fasting. She has been taking shifts as part of the “Starvin’ for Justice” anti-capital punishment protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court to try to convince passersby to join her in opposition as temperatures climb above 100 degrees.
But the solidarity of about 85 protesters involved makes the time joyful, Bosler told RNS, because she’s often the sole person protesting outside the Florida Supreme Court.
In the 50 years since the Gregg decision, faith-based opposition to the death penalty has been a cornerstone of successful abolition and commutation campaigns — even as religious Americans as a whole tend to support the death penalty, data suggests.
“Faith leaders have been instrumental” in death penalty abolition in New Jersey, New Mexico, Connecticut, Virginia and several other states, according to Abraham Bonowitz, the executive director of Death Penalty Action and co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.
(Excerpt) Read more at religionnews.com ...
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Literally not true. The Bible condemns murder, not killing. So dumb.
Apparently, they only read one line. God, Himself instituted the death penalty.
These "faith leaders" are not soft on crime (as the old conservatives trope would have it). They are actively in favor of it.
God as metaphor for Democratic Party interests.
Please be careful with original language.
Exodus 20:13 — “Thou shalt not kill”
Hebrew: לֹא תִּרְצָח
Transliteration: lo tirtsach
Root: ר־צ־ח (r‑ts‑ch)
Semantic range of רָצַח
The root does not mean “kill” in the general sense.
Its attested uses in Biblical Hebrew refer to:
unlawful killing,
intentional homicide,
premeditated or malicious killing,
sometimes negligent homicide,
never legitimate killing in war, self‑defense, or judicial execution.
Let’s not misrepresent God’s Word, please.
This is the "faith leader" they are talking to. Her main gig is as an anti-death penalty advocate. She cosplays as a faith leader because that gives her faux credibility in her advocacy work.
As a further admonition, I implore you to live up to the heritage of your chosen screen name - “Ahithopel” -
He was a WISE, LEARNED, senior advisor to David; later advisor to Absalom.
Nearly all religious leaders are actually "cosplaying".
But street executions are fine.
I definitely considered myself leaning greatly toward the conservative side of things. I still do. My position on the death penalty was that only God had the right to take human life.
Over the decades, hopefully NOT because I've grown surlier and more gruff, I've come to believe that the death penalty is a necessary evil that comes with having a society of laws.
God forgives. God ALWAYS forgives if one is penitent. And so also, there should be forgiveness from mortal people.
But there is a price to be paid for something so heinous as murder. Life is a sacred and precious and priceless thing. If it is ended without repercussion, then the sanctity of life comes to be meaningless.
The death penalty is a price we pay to live in a lawful and ordered society. It's regrettable that it must be said, but there it is.
That has been true for a lot of them. I remember the speaker at my graduation was Sister Helen Prejean, the Catholic Nun who was an anti-death penalty advocate and the basis for the Dead Man Walking Movie that starred Sean Penn back in the 1990s. She was the biggest disappointment of a speaker I ever heard - just ranting and raving against the death penalty. Then we heard her talk afterward and it was more of the same. Ranting and raving about the death penalty. I’ve also had occasion to deal with nuns who work in the homeless advocacy community and they are some of the most humorless scolds you ever want to meet. There is nothing spiritual about them. They rant and rave about any Republican administration (Trump in particular but they ranted and raved about Bush too) and how the government needed to write a blank check for homeless programs. If it wasn’t for their habits, you wouldn’t know they were nuns.
God commands us not to murder
Because there’s plenty of killing in the Bible by the righteous and unrighteous
+1
Wish so called faith leaders werent so dumb.
Ahithopel is not my screen name.
Bzzzt! Nice try but thanks for playing!
Very true. The word is murder, not killing; while a murder is killing, killing isn’t necessarily murder. Makes you wonder how much time the nimrods who make that rediculous claim actually spent reading the Word of God.
By NOT exercising capital justice (punishment) for murder, we are breaking the Everlasting Covenant of Genesis 9 that God made with Man. God said he would no longer destroy the earth with Water if we kept the Covenant.
The biggest problem with the death penalty is that it is know with certainty that some people executed for murder were actually innocent of the crime.
Based on a landmark peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, at least 4.1% of people sentenced to death in the United States are innocent. While the exact percentage of already executed individuals who were truly innocent cannot be known with 100% certainty, legal experts and data researchers point to several key metrics:
The 4% Base Error Rate: The study led by the University of Michigan Law School concluded that because the judicial system operates with a conservative error rate of roughly 1 in 25 capital cases, it is virtually certain that a comparable percentage of executed individuals were innocent.
The Exoneration-to-Execution Ratio: According to the Death Penalty Information Center, for every 8 people executed in the modern U.S. era, 1 other person on death row has been found innocent and officially exonerated.
The Post-Execution Data Gap: The known number of wrongful executions is artificially low because once an inmate is executed, legal systems and defense attorneys almost always stop investigating the case. Funding disappears, and courts rarely grant posthumous DNA testing, which permanently leaves many wrongful executions unproven.
Additional details and case histories of wrongfully convicted death-row inmates are continually tracked by the Innocence Project and the Death Penalty Information Center.
The following ten men are widely recognized by legal scholars, innocence organizations, and investigative journalists as having been wrongfully executed for murders they did not commit:
1. Cameron Todd Willingham (Texas, 2004) - Convicted of a triple-homicide for an alleged arson fire that killed his three children. Evidence later concluded the fire was accidental.
2. Carlos DeLuna (Texas, 1989) - Executed for the 1983 fatal stabbing of a convenience store clerk. Decades later, an extensive Columbia Law School investigation proved he was a victim of mistaken identity, and the real killer had confessed.
3. George Stinney Jr. (South Carolina, 1944) - A 14-year-old boy who was the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century. A judge vacated his conviction 70 years later, ruling his confession was coerced.
4. Joe Arridy (Colorado, 1939) - A mentally disabled man falsely coerced into a confession for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl.
5. Timothy Evans (United Kingdom, 1950) - Hanged in London for the murder of his infant daughter. It was later revealed that the actual serial killer, John Christie, was the true culprit, and Evans was subsequently granted a royal pardon.
6. Jesse Tafero (Florida, 1990) - Convicted of murdering two highway patrol officers. Key witnesses recanted their testimonies, and the real shooter’s confession later surfaced.
7. Larry Griffin (Missouri, 1995) - Convicted of a 1981 drive-by shooting. Eyewitness and investigative discrepancies later revealed Griffin did not commit the crime.
8. Claude Jones (Texas, 2000) - Executed for a liquor store robbery-murder. DNA testing on a hair fragment—the sole piece of evidence tying him to the crime—proved nearly a decade later that it did not belong to him.
9. Ruben Cantu (Texas, 1993) - Executed for a 1984 murder in which he always maintained his innocence. Years later, his co-defendant came forward to confess that Cantu was not present during the crime.
10. David Wayne Spence (Texas, 1997) - Executed for the 1982 Lake Waco murders. Evidence later surfaced indicating the case against him was fabricated, leading investigators to conclude he was innocent.
While on the cross, Jesus forgave the repentant thief. However, there is no record of him asking the soldiers to not execute, but only incarcerate those two thieves.
Punishment for crime is a deterant. Always has been.
A good friend of mine (a black man) was head of chaplains in the Ohio state prison system. While a chaplain himself he also hired, and fired (the lazy) chaplains. He attended several executions, and reluctantly believes they are a deterant.
A murderer is obviously Godless and no where within the bible does it say to just lay down and allow yourself to be eliminated as opposed to subduing and possibly praying for the heathen to find Jesus and seek forgive ness.
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