What is remarkable is that the subject of the inquiry was Jacques Fesch, who was guillotined at 27 for a murder he had committed four years before. After a botched robbery, Fesch had shot wildly (he had lost his glasses) and killed the police officer in pursuit. Fesch was captured and sentenced to die.

Something remarkable happened to Jacques Fesch during his years in prison: God spoke to him and effected a transformation in his soul. Some of Fesch’s letters are in Light over the Scaffold and Cell 18: The Prison Letters of Jacques Fesch, as strong a testimony of conversion as I’ve ever read. Here’s an excerpt from a letter he wrote two years before his death:

“Little by little I was led to change my ideas. I was no longer certain that God did not exist. I began to be open to Him, though I did not yet have faith. I tried to believe with my reason, without praying, or praying ever so little! And then, at the end of my first year in prison, a powerful wave of emotion swept over me, causing deep and brutal suffering. Within the space of a few hours, I came into possession of faith, with absolute certainty. I believed, and could no longer understand how I had ever not believed. Grace had come to me. A great joy flooded my soul and above all a deep peace. In a few instants everything had become clear. it was a very strong, sensible joy that I felt. I tend now to try, perhaps excessively, to recapture it; actually, the essential thing is not emotion, but faith.”

God calls prodigal sons home and welcomes them, as did the father in the parable Jesus told to the tax collectors and sinners to explain the Father’s boundless mercy. I recall the nervous laughter from the glittering audience at the Grammy Awards in 1991 when Bob Dylan collected a prize and quoted his father:

“It’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you and, if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways.”

God does believe in our ability to mend our ways. He graced Jacques Fesch with salvation and he uses all of in the same way. And yet, many states in our nation continue to use the judicial murder called the death penalty to punish sinners like Fesch. France abandoned the death penalty long ago, as did the civilized nations of the world that profess some measure of human rights. As a body, our Bishops have spoken out forcefully against the use of the death penalty, as did Pope John Paul II.

The United States stands with Syria and China as nations that still murder those who commit crimes. The Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, a political show pony who never met a media opportunity he couldn’t glom on to, signed a death warrant recently and, tonight, another human being was killed by lethal injection in our state. The judicial process couldn’t make time for DNA testing to ensure they were not killing an innocent man, even though it has no problem killing those they deem guilty, either.

Jacques Fesch is in a better place with his God, as are all those who are the victims of violence. Only God can judge us in life or death. Whether murder is committed by an individual the State then judges or whether it’s committed by the State that kills without impunity, murder is murder. We serve a God who believes we can mend our ways, to quote Dylan. It’s time to erase the death penalty from our nation’s history of violence.

UPDATE ON 2/9/09: Eluana Englaro went to her Heavenly Father tonight. In pace requiescat.

The case of Eluana Englaro is a hot issue in Italy and the rest of Catholic Europe, but it has barely dented our nation’s psyche. Most of the updates I’ve read have been in foreign online journals, where it’s become a right-to-life cause similar to Terri Schiavo’s death struggle here in Tampa Bay in 2005.

In 1992, Eluana was in an auto accident that left her in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), which is essentially a long-term coma with periods of wakefulness, but no cognition. Her father, Beppino Englaro, had petitioned Italian courts to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube. It is what she would have wanted, he says. Despite the efforts of the Vatican and pro-life groups in Italy and the rest of Europe, it looks like Eluana’s slow death will begin today because her father has transferred her from a Catholic clinic to a secular hospice that has agreed not to feed her. As we who support an end to the death penalty know, it is only the State that can kill without impunity. It gives itself the power of God to say who deserves to live or die.

During Terri Schiavo’s battle, I visited the nursing home whose environs had become a media circus as her family and her husband fought over her Constitutionally-guaranteed right to life.  I parked at a supermarket shopping center in Pinellas Park and walked a few blocks to the nursing home. Everywhere, there were protestors, Rosary circles, pro-life and pro-euthanasia signs, national media with their spots staked out by portable tents and, most of all, law enforcement.

An elementary school ironically called Cross Bayou was down the street and the students were evacuated during one or two of the days of the Schiavo furor. Law enforcement imagined that, with so many pro-life people around, there would be an act of criminal sabotage. They did nothing to stop the actual crime that was being committed inside the nursing home, where Terri Schiavo was murdered. She died of dehydration; her parents couldn’t convince a court that taking the Body of Christ in Communion wouldn’t be “nourishment.”

And so Eluana Englaro will most likely die in the same way as Terri Schiavo: She will die of thirst. Jesus said, “I thirst,” during his own agonizing death and Eluana can only appeal to Him now. Whether her earthly father says he knows what she would have wanted or not, she is a human being in the image of God, her Heavenly Father. No one has a right to take away her life.

Pray for Eluana, yes, but also pray for those who imagine that they can play God to determine who lives and dies. Murder is the gravest of sins, no matter who commits it. The State is not exempt.