Death Row Is His Parish
“Friend” is a word Ingle actually uses. Even if you belong to the good-riddance school of penology, you probably don’t begrudge the condemned a man of the cloth for company. Ingle is that company. A minister with the United Church of Christ, he’s director of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, and death row is his parish. He despises it. “Justice, mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation,” he writes, “are unknown elements in a system designated for extermination.”
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Hardened reporters might accuse him of flinching. “Willie [Darden] looked at me, holding me fast with his gaze. I had removed the Committee of Southern Churchmen symbol that I wear around my neck. I held the symbol in my clenched fist before my face. Willie Darden and I looked into each other’s eyes, the symbol uniting us in life and into death. The guards tilted Willie’s shaved head back against the chair at an uncomfortable angle. With his head held back, a chin strap was fastened around his jaw. . . . Then, as they dropped the black mask over his face, he waved good-bye with his left hand, even though his arm was strapped down to the infernal device. I almost lost control. After his face was covered, I returned the cross to my neck and dropped my head in unceasing prayer.” Ingle doesn’t look up again until Willie Darden is dead.
But if Joseph Ingle believes that executing the innocent is a terrible thing, he also believes that executing the guilty is a terrible thing, a godless act that serves no end but vengeance. And the reader who follows Ingle into the company of the damned for their final days and hours is apt to decide that Ingle might be right.
Is your faith at risk? we asked.
This hypocritical exercise is not routine yet in the north. But a new day is dawning. Before Charles Walker, no one had been executed in Illinois in 28 years. Behind Walker, another 124 condemned prisoners, 80 of them black, wait their turn.
“I think he’ll practice the politics of the death penalty,” Ingle predicted–accurately. “Most people want this man killed.”
