The United States is the only Western industrialized nation to have a death penalty. In the East, Japan still uses it as a form of punishment, but China invokes the death penalty more frequently than any other industrialized nation. Russia abolished the death penalty as a prerequisite to joining the European Union,” commented Arthur Hopkirk, chairman of the Task Force to End the Death Penalty. “However,” he noted, “the rate of executions in this country is dropping. In the last thirty years there have been 1,000 executions, a disproportionate number of them in Texas. Within this thirty years period, 355 executions have occurred in that state.” The Task Force To End The Death Penalty has as its mission to educate the congregation and its extended family to the arbitrariness of the judicial system in practical and ethical terms. Arthur, who has chaired this committee for more than three years, is eminently qualified to lead this group. He has been a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society for twenty years. A graduate of Columbia Law School and Princeton University, Arthur has been a stalwart opponent of the death penalty for many years.

Recently, during Sunday Coffee Hour, the committee manned a table in Reidy-Friendship Hall to distribute educational materials on abolishing the death penalty and to urge All Souls members to contact their state senators to vote against a proposed amendment to reinstate the death penalty in New York. Arthur said that he doubts the bill will pass in the Assembly. “There is little evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to capital crime,” he affirmed.

Last Spring the Task Force hosted a program featuring Professor David Dow, an anti-death penalty activist, who teaches at the University of Houston Law Center in Texas. He discussed his recent book, Executed On A Technicality: Legal Injustice Along America’s Death Row. Over the years, Dr. Dow has represented many prisoners on Texas’ death row. Other programs featured David Kaczynski, executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty and brother of Ted Kaczynski, known as the elusive Unabomber. Lawyers, prison officials, politicians and even a writer and mother whose daughter and son-in-law were murdered and who is staunchly opposed to the death penalty, have been speakers and panelists in recent years. Committee member Joann Wooters-Reisin sees to it that All Souls’ hand-bells are rung on the evening of an execution. For Whom The Bells Toll is a national program.

The committee met recently to consider future programming. After much discussion, they decided to focus on mental illness as it relates to trial and punishment. This includes such diseases as schizophrenia, dissociative and other psychotic disorders, post-traumatic syndrome and limited mental capacity and how these syndromes relate to moral culpability.

Arthur also chairs the All Souls Church Council and headed the Church delegation to GA in 2004. Alex Lesman founded the Task Force in 1998.