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By Kathy L. Gilbert*

4:00 P.M. EST March 21, 2011 | NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS)

Elizabeth Coyle, right, assists Krysta Rexrode Wolfe in looking up her state representatives during a letter-writing campaign to exclude individuals with severe and persistent mental illness from the death penalty in Tennessee. UMNS photos by Kathleen Barry. View in Photo Gallery

Billy Ray Irick is on death row in Tennessee for the 1985 rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl.

According to Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Irick has suffered with mental illness since he was a small child and is functioning at the level of a 7- to 9-year-old child.

Should he be executed?

For a group of Vanderbilt Divinity School students, the answer is no. The students, part of a nationwide effort by mental health organizations, gathered March 17 to write letters to their state representatives supporting two bills that would exclude mentally ill people from execution in Tennessee.

“Often those who are tried for these crimes are not fully aware of their crimes,” said Elizabeth Coyle, an organizer of the event and student at the divinity school. “I think they should be tried differently and sentenced differently within the system.” She is a member of Christ the King Catholic parish in Nashville.

“There is a big push across the country at this point to exclude those individuals—not from justice, not from punishment, not from jail time—but to exclude them from the penalty of death,” said the Rev. Brian Rossbert, pastor of Centenary and New Bethel United Methodist churches in Nashville.

Closer to abolition

Recently two death row inmates, one from Oregon and another from North Carolina, had their death sentences removed because of concerns about their mental competency.

Kyle Lambelet, foreground, writes a letter in support of excluding individuals with severe and persistent mental illness from the death penalty in Tennessee. Joining him is
the Rev. Brian Rossbert.
View in Photo Gallery

The National Alliance on Mental Illness describes mental illness as medical conditions that disrupt a person's thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning. Serious mental illnesses include major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and borderline personality disorder.

While the ultimate goal is to abolish the death penalty, the Vanderbilt students agree this bill is an important step in that journey.

“My understanding of the gospel is essentially a pro-life position. Jesus teaches that we should not be taking lives and especially in situations where we have options, like life sentences that don’t require the taking of life,” said Brandon Blacksten, a third-year divinity student at Vanderbilt and pastoral intern at Glendale United Methodist Church in Nashville.

Krysta Rexrode Wolfe, also a pastoral intern, is a native of West Virginia, where the death penalty was abolished in 1965. Wolfe is assisting Rossbert.

“I wrote in my letter that I was shocked and disappointed that we are supposed to be evolving as moral and people of liberty and yet we continue to deny people of their value … specifically people with mental illnesses, which is what this drive was for today,” she said. “We are depriving them of that evolution that we claim to be participating in all the time.”

Opening eyes

Rossbert has been actively advocating for an end to the death penalty in Tennessee. At the 2010 United Methodist Tennessee Annual (regional) Conference, he drafted a resolution that called for the governor to commute the sentence of Gaile Owens, a woman on death row for the hired murder of her husband.

Brandon Blacksten, a third-year master of divinity student, writes a letter to his senator. Blacksten is a pastor intern at Glendale United Methodist Church in Nashville. View in Photo Gallery

Owens' attorneys contend evidence of physical, sexual and emotional abuse was never presented at her trial. Since that time, her sentence was commuted to life in prison.

The Tennessee Conference passed the resolution, which also reaffirmed The United Methodist Church’s opposition to the death penalty, a stance it has held since 1956.

There is an overall ethic of love and life in the scriptures, Rossbert said. He pointed to Matthew 5, which disputes an “eye for an eye” and teaches “to turn the other cheek.”

“The speech that Moses gives in Deuteronomy 30:19-20 may actually be more helpful as it concerns all the choices we make in our lives, large and small.”

Rossbert said a quote from Gandhi brings in both perspectives of those scriptures.

“Gandhi said, ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’”

*Gilbert is a multimedia reporter for the young adult content team at United Methodist Communications, Nashville, Tenn.

News media contact: Kathy L. Gilbert, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.