What you can do

Strong public opposition is essential to convince state legislators to confront the flaws with the death penalty. You can assist this effort by asking groups such as your Friends Meeting, congregation, city council and community organizations to adopt a resolution requesting a moratorium on executions. Use the resolution and the questions about the death penalty included with this newsletter as a guide.

-Steve Birdlebough

[Box]

"Just Revenge" (Worth Publishers ISBN 0-312-17945-6, 1998 ), by Mark Costanzo, summarizes vast amounts of research in a well-written and nearly encyclopedic fashion, using a fair-minded and analytical style to summarize the arguments and difficult questions regarding capital punishment that are raised as the debate over capital punishment rages on.

"Sermons, Homilies, Reflections on the Death Penalty," available from the American Friends Service Committee 1501 Cherry Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102 (215) 241-7000.

General Secretary of Friends United Meeting, Johan Maurer

"Washington Post " Columnist E.J. Dionne

"Newsweek" writer Jonathan Alter

Conservative Columnist George Will

"Los Angeles Times" editorial, 6/13/00

I had breakfast on a recent morning with Russ and Mary Jorgensen at their cottage at the Monan's Rill community in the hills above Santa Rosa. They introduced me to Quakers more than thirty years ago when Russ hired me to work with the American Friends Service Committee in San Francisco as the director of the Austin MacCormick Center.

The Center was an experimental half-way house for men who had been in prison. The experience "turned my life upside down" as early Friends would say.

For four years I lived with the kind of people I had been taught to fear as I was growing up. That fear subsided as I experienced the "let us try and see what love can do" side of Quakerism.

I came away deeply convinced that prisons as we know them are institutions that harm human beings and that an enlightened society will experiment energetically to find new ways to deal with crime and justice. And here I am more than 30 years later working with the Friends Committee on Legislation in Sacramento on these same issues.

I asked Russ and Mary about the origins of the Friends Committee on Legislation of California. "In the early fifties there were a number of legislative issues that the AFSC was working on," said Russ, "I thought that there should be a branch of the Friends Committee on National Legislation out here, so I made a phone call to Raymond Wilson,then the Executive Secretary of the FCNL in Washington and he suggested that we start an FCL without the 'N'.

"Six of us, including Bud Morrisset, Cecil Thomas, and Catherine Gumpertz, met every two weeks at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco and ironed out what we would do. The AFSC Executive Committee was kept informed. "Soon we took a big step and invited Friends Meetings and Churches to get involved. Even if some of the Churches didn't respond, some individuals did."

"We held the founding meeting in May 1952 at the Berkeley Friends Church. We decided to start a new Friends organization, a political counterpart of the AFSC, a state counterpart of the Friends Committee on National Legislation. In October of 1952 the office of FCL opened in the AFSC building on Sutter Street in San Francisco."

Later, back in the FCL office in Sacramento, I looked up the founders' description of the Friends Committee on Legislation. At first it was called the Friends Committee on Legislation of Northern California. In November of 1952 that changed when an Executive Committee was formed in Southern California, under the leadership of Roscoe Warren.

Friends Committee on Legislation of California was constructed as much more than a Friends social lobby agency. It envisioned an outreach aimed at involving Friends and those of like mind in a witness with California State Government. It was a huge job for one staff and a committee. Yet the first year they managed to involve more than nine-hundred supporters and activists. A massive outreach.

Breakfast with the Jorgensens in the morning on the ridge at Monans Rill was not just a delightful bit of nostalgia. The future of FCL depends on adding 900 more supporters soon? Will you help?

-Peter Crysdale

Here are some excerpts from the original statement of purpose of the Friends Committee on Legislation of Northern California:

[Caption under photo] The founding meeting of the Friends Committee on Legislation held at Berkeley friends Church, May 1952. (Can you help us name the Friends in this photo?)

When the legislature sent the 2000-01 State Budget to Governor Gray Davis in June, it included $105,000 for the State Public Defender and the Attorney General to evaluate automatic review of death sentences by the California Supreme Court.

About the same time, the California Field Poll uncovered a remarkable shift in public opinion. Even though most Californians still support the death penalty, opposition has doubled since 1992 and 73% of Californians now favor suspension of executions. Elsewhere in the country, Illinois has ceased executions pending further evaluation of the death penalty and presidential candidate George W. Bush's implementation of 134 executions during his tenure as governor of Texas has been questioned widely in the press and the public.

Doubts about whether any system can fairly decide who should be executed have been propelled by spectacles such as the O.J. Simpson trial, where the Los Angeles District Attorney declined to seek the death penalty and the defendant walked free, even though most observers were convinced he had committed a double murder.

Millions of Americans who followed the Simpson case concluded that his ability to spend millions of dollars on high-priced lawyers led to his acquittal. If money could obtain an acquittal, it isn't too hard to imagine how a lack of money could lead to a wrongful execution, and money has been in short supply in the offices of public defenders recently.

The flaws in California's system of justice have already been underlined twice this year by the release of prisoners mistakenly convicted of murder In February, Dwayne McKinney, who had spent 20 years behind bars after a wrongful conviction for murdering a Burger King manager, was finally cleared by new evidence. The Orange County district attorney had sought the death penalty. His life was spared because the jury decided instead on life without possibility of parole. In May, David Quindt, who had been wrongly convicted of a home invasion murder, was freed after Sacramento prosecutors obtained confessions implicating three other suspects in the crime.

The public has been surprised by these revelations because many presume that courts use extra care in murder cases. Had either of these men received the death penalty, we might never have known that an innocent man had been executed.

Cases such as these undermine the myth that defendants in California are adequately protected by dedicated public defenders or by counsel appointed by judges who understand the importance of avoiding errors at the trial.

Several factors have served to erode the credibility of the criminal justice system

What you can do

Strong public opposition is essential to convince state legislators to confront the flaws with the death penalty. You can assist this effort by asking groups such as your Friends Meeting, congregation, city council and community organizations to adopt a resolution requesting a moratorium on executions. Use the resolution and the questions about the death penalty included with this newsletter as a guide.

-Steve Birdlebough

[Box]

"Just Revenge" (Worth Publishers ISBN 0-312-17945-6, 1998 ), by Mark Costanzo, summarizes vast amounts of research in a well-written and nearly encyclopedic fashion, using a fair-minded and analytical style to summarize the arguments and difficult questions regarding capital punishment that are raised as the debate over capital punishment rages on.

"Sermons, Homilies, Reflections on the Death Penalty," available from the American Friends Service Committee 1501 Cherry Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102 (215) 241-7000.

General Secretary of Friends United Meeting, Johan Maurer

"Washington Post " Columnist E.J. Dionne

"Newsweek" writer Jonathan Alter

Conservative Columnist George Will

"Los Angeles Times" editorial, 6/13/00

I had breakfast on a recent morning with Russ and Mary Jorgensen at their cottage at the Monan's Rill community in the hills above Santa Rosa. They introduced me to Quakers more than thirty years ago when Russ hired me to work with the American Friends Service Committee in San Francisco as the director of the Austin MacCormick Center.

The Center was an experimental half-way house for men who had been in prison. The experience "turned my life upside down" as early Friends would say.

For four years I lived with the kind of people I had been taught to fear as I was growing up. That fear subsided as I experienced the "let us try and see what love can do" side of Quakerism.

I came away deeply convinced that prisons as we know them are institutions that harm human beings and that an enlightened society will experiment energetically to find new ways to deal with crime and justice. And here I am more than 30 years later working with the Friends Committee on Legislation in Sacramento on these same issues.

I asked Russ and Mary about the origins of the Friends Committee on Legislation of California. "In the early fifties there were a number of legislative issues that the AFSC was working on," said Russ, "I thought that there should be a branch of the Friends Committee on National Legislation out here, so I made a phone call to Raymond Wilson,then the Executive Secretary of the FCNL in Washington and he suggested that we start an FCL without the 'N'.

"Six of us, including Bud Morrisset, Cecil Thomas, and Catherine Gumpertz, met every two weeks at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco and ironed out what we would do. The AFSC Executive Committee was kept informed. "Soon we took a big step and invited Friends Meetings and Churches to get involved. Even if some of the Churches didn't respond, some individuals did."

"We held the founding meeting in May 1952 at the Berkeley Friends Church. We decided to start a new Friends organization, a political counterpart of the AFSC, a state counterpart of the Friends Committee on National Legislation. In October of 1952 the office of FCL opened in the AFSC building on Sutter Street in San Francisco."

Later, back in the FCL office in Sacramento, I looked up the founders' description of the Friends Committee on Legislation. At first it was called the Friends Committee on Legislation of Northern California. In November of 1952 that changed when an Executive Committee was formed in Southern California, under the leadership of Roscoe Warren.

Friends Committee on Legislation of California was constructed as much more than a Friends social lobby agency. It envisioned an outreach aimed at involving Friends and those of like mind in a witness with California State Government. It was a huge job for one staff and a committee. Yet the first year they managed to involve more than nine-hundred supporters and activists. A massive outreach.

Breakfast with the Jorgensens in the morning on the ridge at Monans Rill was not just a delightful bit of nostalgia. The future of FCL depends on adding 900 more supporters soon? Will you help?

-Peter Crysdale

Here are some excerpts from the original statement of purpose of the Friends Committee on Legislation of Northern California:

[Caption under photo] The founding meeting of the Friends Committee on Legislation held at Berkeley friends Church, May 1952. (Can you help us name the Friends in this photo?)