Families, experts talk death penalty at the Mount
Published on October 1, 2006

By Liam Farrell
News-Post Staff

EMMITSBURG -- Nothing about Shannon Shieber suggested her life would
be anything but happy and successful.
By the time she was 18 months old, Shannon could recite the entire
alphabet; she was a straight-A student and National Merit Scholar
finalist; she graduated from Duke University in three years despite a
triple-major; and at only 23 years old, Shannon had entered the Ph.D.
program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania on a
full scholarship.
"Shannon was a gift beyond anything you could possibly believe," said
her mother, Vicki Shieber. "Everything about her was not only
brilliant, but beautiful."
In May 1998, a serial rapist pried open the balcony door to Shannon's
brownstone apartment in Philadelphia, raped her and strangled her to
death.
Ms. Shieber was a speaker Saturday at a conference on the death
penalty at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg titled "Witness
and Action: Christian Responses to the Death Penalty in Maryland."
Although the mother of a murder victim, Ms. Shieber told conference
attendees how her religious background, and the principles she raised
Shannon on, necessitated mercy and forgiveness, not vengeance, when
the killer was apprehended.
Ms. Shieber said people would ask her, "Don't you love your
daughter?" and "Don't you want him put to death?" when they found out
she only wanted life in prison without parole.
But, steadfast in her faith, Ms. Shieber said her morals prevented
such desires.
"(The Lord's Prayer says) forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us," she said. "It never came to life
until we had to live through this."
The conference, which featured exonerated death row inmates,
chaplains and authors, was organized by Dr. Trudy Conway, a professor
of philosophy and the faculty moderator for the student group
Campaign to End the Death Penalty at Mount St. Mary's.
Ms. Conway said the conference was the result of a more than two-year
conversation on campus about the moral and ethical effects of the
death penalty.
All opinions, from support to dissent, were welcomed in the debate,
Ms. Conway said, and the overall goal was to encourage students to
become active in social justice issues.
"We view it as encouraging our students to develop the vocation of
responsible citizenship," she said.
Speakers peppered their remarks with comments on how, morally, the
death penalty cannot be sanctioned by religious ethics. T-shirts on
sale in the lobby of Marion Burke Knott Auditorium proclaimed "Being
'Pro-Life' also means being against executions."
Dale Recinella, a Catholic lay chaplain for Florida's death row
inmates and the author of "The Biblical Truth about America's Death
Penalty," said the Bible is frequently misinterpreted as supporting
the death penalty through oft-mentioned scripture such as "an eye for
an eye."
The Bible, Mr. Recinella said, shows a pattern of different responses
to murderers, including exile, repentance and conversion.
Some of the Bible's heroes, including David, Moses and Saul, also
committed murder, Mr. Recinella said.
"(The Bible's) a revelation of an entirely different response, where
vengeance is for the Lord alone," he said. "The death penalty does
not give anything to anybody."
The entire schema of the death penalty debate has to be changed, Mr.
Recinella said, by engaging its advocates to show it is an imperfect
system that will result in immorality -- namely, the sacrifice of
innocent lives in the service of an unattainable ideal of poorly
identified justice.
"We need for faith and reason to be brought to this so the people
can make morally reasonable choices," he said. "It's a system that is
human.  You can't have the American death penalty without killing some
innocent people."