Execution opens death sentence debate

People are divided over the death penalty. Some argue that it's cruel and unusual punishment, others say it's adequate retribution for a heinous crime.

James Pusey, associate professor of Japanese and East Asian Studies, attended a vigil at the Rockville Penitentiary in Bellefonte, Pa., Tuesday night to protest the execution that evening of Keith Zettlemoyer, the first person in Pennsylvania to be executed under the death penalty in 33 years.

Pusey is completely opposed to capital punishment, no matter what the crime.

"It is barbaric to kill," he said.

Saying he thought the Supreme Court had put this "long historical practice behind us," he added, "There is no excuse at all to kill in order to try to stop killing."

But Jeni Watkins thinks the punishment should fit the crime. "The only way murder is excusable is if it's in self-defense," she said.

Marleise Beach says that applying the death penalty depends on the person convicted of murder. "If it's a serial killer and there is no doubt that person did it, then I say ok."

But she adds that if the person in question has killed only one person, she's less willing to say he or she should die. "Historically there has been people on death row who haven't even done the thing they've been convicted of doing," she said. Zettlemoyer, a Selinsgrove man, was convicted in 1981 of murdering Charles DeVetsco of Sunbury in 1980 after DeVetsco agreed to testify against Zettlemoyer.

Zettlemoyer faced trial for allegedly robbing the Radio Shack in the Susquehanna Valley Mall where he worked as a security guard.

Zettlemoyer received his orders for execution under the new governor, Thomas P. Ridge, who ran for office on a platform that included reinstating capital punishment.

Of the approximately 150 people who protested the execution Tuesday, 21 people from Bucknell and Lewisburg attended.

Other groups attending the vigil were members of the Pennsylvania Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Families of Murder Victims Against the Death Penalty, and Pax Christi, a Catholic peace and justice group that rejects capital punishment as a way to address the increasing violence in American society.

Forming a circle in a grassy field across from the prison, the protesters held lit candles, prayed, and chanted "Shame, Shame" after prison officials executed Zettlemoyer.

John Applegate '97, who also attended the vigil, says that although he doesn't have a solution for stopping crime, he feels our society needs to move toward criminal reform, or helping criminals to rehabilitate themselves rather than "accumulating in jail cells," Applegate said.

[ back to Golden Gater Online August 31, 1995 ]

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