On Sept. 1, 1992, independent presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, then a political prisoner at the federal Rochester Medical Facility in Rochester, Minnesota, issued a policy statement titled “Why I Demand an End to the Death Penalty in the United States.” In it, LaRouche asserted:
“First, simply: Every human being is in the living image of God, by virtue of that divine spark of reason which sets man apart from and above all lower forms of life. When we execute a person, no matter how hideous the crime they may have committed (if they indeed did commit it), we are forgoing the possibility of the redemption of that soul. And we must never deny, in a Christian civilization in particular, the possibility of redemption.
“Secondly, also in the ideal situation: When a society takes a person who is helpless and at their disposal, a helpless captive, and murders that person, even under due process of law, that society brutalizes itself as a whole, and brutalizes those persons and agencies which we require to execute that form of so-called punishment.”
LaRouche continued: “Now, to the other grounds. We do not have, by any means, an ideal system of justice. We have in the United States, presently reported, about 2,500 persons, largely from minority groups, who are sitting on death row, now waiting for assembly-line butchering. And all the methods of which I’ve heard for execution, whether gas chamber (that’s the Nazi method), lethal injection (which is a liquid version of the Nazi method practiced in Arkansas), or the brutish use of the electric chair in Virginia: All of these are torture. This is death by torture, of the same type done by the Nazis in gas chambers, to which postwar objections were registered. Of the 2,500 on the assembly line for mass executions, lawyers who are expert in this area assure me that at least 10% are unquestionably innocent, and that probably double that number have clear, colorable claims to innocence. That’s about 500 people, of this 2,500, who are innocent.”
