Saturday, March 23, 2013
In the Austin American-Statesman!
There is a great story today about our trial this week in the Austin American Statesman by Juan Castillo. Here is an excerpt:
Christians seem to make a distinction between Jesus’ wrongful execution and the execution of criminals, in part, Osler said, “because Christians tend to see Christ as unimaginably good and capital defendants as unimaginably bad. (But) Jesus taught that, ‘When you visit someone in prison, you visit me.’ He didn’t say when you visit the innocent person.”
At the heart of the Christian faith, said Bishop, is the execution of a man who himself stopped an execution, that of a woman accused of adultery. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the crowd that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. The woman is one of the witnesses Bishop calls.
In 1990, Bishop’s sister, her brother-in-law and their unborn child were murdered in a home invasion near Chicago, a case that did not result in the death penalty. The murders only increased her opposition to capital punishment, she said.
“I understood the grief and loss of someone you love having been taken suddenly and violently,” Bishop said. “The way to honor my sister is not through more bloodshed; digging another grave will do nothing but create another grieving family like mine.”
