SOUTH BEND (OSV News) – The University of Notre Dame Law School hosted for the first time a four-day event to promote the abolition of the death penalty. Its March 24-27 Death Penalty Abolition Week brought to campus nationally known and respected opponents of the death penalty. Key arguments agai nst capital punishment, now a legal option in 27 states, were made by law school representatives who introduced speakers. “Anyone who has spent any time in any Catholic school must realize that they’ve spent time face to face with the violence, brutality, and innate inhumanity of the death penalty,” said G. Marcus Cole, dean of the Notre Dame Law School. “It is clearly depicted on the wall of every Catholic classroom in every Catholic school – in the form of the crucifix on the wall. Our Lord Jesus Christ was a victim of the death penalty.” New York City Councilman Yusef Salaam holds a copy of the New York Daily News at the Notre Dame Law School March 24, 2025, opening day of the school’s inaugural Death Penalty Abolition Week. Salaam was one of five teenagers eventually proven to have been wrongly convicted in the 1989 assault of a jogger in Central Park in a case that came to be known as the “Central Park Five” case. The Daily News headline story Sallam showed was on a juror in the trial acknowledging the mistake. (OSV News photo/Matt Cashore, University of Notre Dame) Cole said that in 2018, Pope Francis made it clear that Catholics must now oppose the death penalty. “He changed 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to clearly articulate our united opposition to the death penalty,” he said. “Every human life is created in the image and likeness of God and has to be treated that way. Today there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person who has committed a crime is not lost – even after the commission of a serious crime.” That increasing recognition and understanding of the innate dignity of every human person – even a convicted criminal – was a major theme in the third talk of the week given by Syl Schieber. Schieber and his wife, Vicki, lost their 23-year-old daughter, Shannon, after she was raped and murdered in her Philadelphia apartment on May 7, 1998, by Troy Graves, a serial killer. “Two nights later, Vicky and I were at Saturday night Mass and at the Lord’s Prayer, when we got to the words, ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ I lost my voice. But, almost immediately, I came to understand what being a Christian was about in a much deeper way than I ever had,” Schieber told the audience. In the weeks that followed Shannon’s death, the Schiebers grieved deeply but told police detectives, their pastor, and friends that they would not push for the death penalty if and when their daughter’s murderer was finally arrested and tried. Syl Schieber said that pushback against their death penalty opposition began to come in a variety of ways and from different directions. “Once they caught the murderer in Colorado in April of 2002, the big news in Philadelphia was not that they had him, but that the Schiebers were going to object to the death penalty,” Schieber said, still clearly shocked by this response. “And the district attorney in Philadelphia, Lynne Abraham, said that the death penalty was appropriate in Shannon’s case and that she would pursue it.” The Schiebers began to explain that they based their views about the death penalty on their faith. “But we also pointed out that there were racial and economic disparities in how these death penalties were applied,” he said. “And there are district attorneys around the country who really want to pursue the death penalty for those convicted of murder. They want to be tough on crime. Judicial misconduct has been found in many of these cases.” New York City Councilman Yusef Salaam, sitting in chair closest to the camera, addresses attendees at Notre Dame Law School March 24, 2025, the opening day of the school’s inaugural Death Penalty Abolition Week. Salaam was one of five teenagers eventually proven to have been wrongly convicted in the 1989 assault of a jogger in Central Park in a case that came to be known as the “Central Park Five” case. (OSV News photo/Matt Cashore, University of Notre Dame) Sister Helen Prejean, an internationally renowned advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, shared her story on Death Penalty Abolition Week’s final day in a courtroom auditorium crowded with students. “I taught seventh and eighth grade and then in high school,” the Sister of St. Joseph began, claiming that as a young religious sister, she knew absolutely nothing about social justice issues. “I didn’t even know any poor people!” But, after going to a conference focused on the needs of others, she moved to an inner-city housing project in New Orleans and began working at Hope House. Soon after, she volunteered to write letters to a death-row prisoner and connected with Pat Sonnier. Their relationship through the mail grew, and Sister Helen soon filled out the compulsory form to visit him. Since she was not a family member, she identified herself as “spiritual adviser.” “Little did I know that two years later, the only one who could be with him when he was put in the holding cell there in the death house and then accompany him to execution was going to be his spiritual adviser – me,” she said. “We hadn’t had an execution in Louisiana in 20 years. This was in the early ‘80s. The Supreme Court had restored it in 1976, but I hadn’t noticed.” “I came out after watching Pat be killed in the middle of the night on April 5, 1984,” she recalled. “It was dark, and there were sisters who were waiting for me in the Louisiana State Penitentiary parking lot along with these good lawyers who’d worked on the case. The first thing I did was throw up! But that’s also when the mission to talk to all of you about this issue began. I’m a witness.” In 1993, Sister Helen’s book “Dead Man Walking” was published. It was a groundbreaking account of what she had learned about Sonnier but also about the cruel inhumanity of the death penalty in America. Two years later, the movie “Dead Man Walking” starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon brought her story to a much larger audience. “When my book came out, 80 percent of the American public said that they supported the death penalty,” she said. “We hadn’t had the dialogue to get into the deeper moral issues of who we are as a people,” she continued. “The death penalty is about us. The death penalty is always going to be torture – an extreme physical and mental assault on someone who’s been rendered defenseless. And we should not identify a human being solely with the worst act of his or her life.” Representatives from Catholic Mobilizing Network, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates to end the death penalty, were especially pleased with this inaugural Death Penalty Abolition Week, and that so many young people attended the talks. CMN’s executive director, Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, described the organization’s goal as “to mobilize Catholics and all people of goodwill to value life over death, to end the use of the death penalty, to transform the U.S. criminal legal system from punitive to restorative.” “The data shows us that – by and large – U.S. support for the death penalty continues to decline,” she said, noting that a 2024 report from Gallup’s Annual Crime Survey demonstrates that public support for the death penalty has dropped to 53 percent, the lowest it has been since the 1970s. The post ND Law School Event Argues for Abolishing the Death Penalty appeared first on Today's Catholic. ...read more read less