A case for true believers

Martin Link, 47, is scheduled to be executed in Missouri tomorrow, February 9, at 12:01 a.m. Central Time, for a crime he committed 20 years ago. He will be Missouri's first execution in almost two years. But Martin is no martyr. He is a convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. I can't beg for mercy for him because of a biased jury, flimsy evidence, mistaken identity or any other reason. One has to be really against the death penalty to oppose Martin Link's execution. He's a hard man to defend. Even Link has seemed disinterested in saving himself; he attempted suicided by cutting his wrists three years ago. Ironically, prison officials and doctors worked to save his life for his execution.  At 12:01 tomorrow morning, tonight really, may God have mercy on him.

Elissa Self-Braun was only 11 years old in January, 1991. She had a three-block walk to catch her school bus to Enright Classical Junior Academy in St. Louis, Missouri, a school for gifted children. Elissa left her home on Friday, January 11, around 6:30 a.m. to catch that bus, but she never made it to the school. Four days later, on Tuesday, January 15, her body was found 135 miles from St. Louis on a pile of debris on the banks of the St. Francis River.

A little over a week later, Martin Link was driving in Kirkwood, Missouri, with one headlight out. When police tried to pull him over, he attempted to get away, leading them on a brief high-speed chase until he ran into a telephone pole. So police knew he had more to hide than just an outed headlight. They found in his car a jar of petroleum jelly containing flecks of blood. His fingerprints were identified on the outside of the jar, and the blood found inside the jar was traced to Elissa Self-Braun through DNA analysis. In addition, his DNA matched that found in the sperm on the vaginal swabs taken from Elissa's body. Her blood in his jar, his DNA in her body. A two-way match. That was all the jury needed, and all I need, to find Martin Link guilty of kidnapping, forcible rape, and first-degree murder.

If anyone deserves the death penalty, it is Martin Link. Yet I do not want to see him killed. I do not believe in an eye for an eye. I would prefer life without the possibility of parole. I grieve whenever there is an execution. I grieve for the condemned, whose life is cut short not by God but by the state and who may not yet be prepared to die. I grieve for the victim, in this case the 11-year-old girl Elissa Self-Braun, who must have suffered terribly before her death. God help her. And I grieve for her parents, and all who loved her, who suffered the agony of not knowing where she was or what was happening to her for four days, and who must live without her now and all the hundreds of days in between. But most of all, I grieve for our society, which has so run out of answers and solutions that it knows nothing more to do than to legally sanction the state's taking the life of one of its citizens.

Amnesty International says that the death penalty is "the ultimate denial of human rights. It is the cold-blooded and premeditated killing of a human being by the state." It is also the greatest wielding of state power. Most of the countries in the world have eliminated the death penalty in law or in practice. The United States stands alone among developed Western nations in killing its own citizens, just as we stand alone in the rate at which we kill one another.  I think there is a connection there. Life has become pretty cheap in our culture. Because the death penalty is the greatest violation of the right to life, it can only occur when we allow exceptions to that right. And once we begin allowing exceptions, there is no end to the violence. There can be a million excuses to kill.

The anthropologist Colin Turnbull, famous for writing The Forest People and The Mountain People, worked with death row prisoners in his later years.  Turnbull wrote about the death penalty, showing  how it brutalizes the society that implements it in the true sense of the word 'brutalize.'  It hardens our hearts. It makes US brutes. It makes US killers without conscience. What kind of people can rejoice at a death and sing "Burn, Baby, Burn"? What do you have to do to your humanity before you can do that? And what are the repercussions for our society when it's made up of people who have done that to their humanity?

Yes, Martin Link is a brute. He deserves to die. He deserves no mercy. But the nature of mercy is that it is given to the deserving and the undeserving - it is a gift. And do we deserve to be his killers? At 12:01 tomorrow morning, tonight really, may God have mercy on us.

ADDENDUM 6:30 p.m. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering Martin Link's case. At issue is the fact the governor, Jay Nixon, who denied Link's appeal for clemency, was the attorney general when Link was convicted.

ADDENDUM The State of Missouri executed Martin Link at 12:15 a.m., February 9, 2011. The parents of his victim Elissa Self-Braun were present as witnesses. Elissa would now be 31 years old.