Vicki Schieber and the Case Against Execution

By Colman McCarthy

When shaping our views against the death penalty, most of us abolitionists are armchair opinionators well removed from the wracking emotions of killing, whether by murderers or states. For us, it’s an intellectual issue—one of many. Debate it. Ponder it. Stay current.

That’s it. Next issue.

The death penalty opponents I admire and honor the most are those who have felt, and still feel, the pain of loss: a family member murdered. One of these is Vicki Schieber. For me, and large numbers of others, she stands high in both the strength of her commitment to end capital punishment and her generosity in giving time to educate the public.

Vicki Schieber, who is in her early 60s and lives with her economist husband Sylvester in Chevy Chase, Md., has been a frequent speaker in my high school and college classes. Few students are unmoved, especially those at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School where the Schieber’s daughter, Shannon, was a star student. After graduating in 1992, she studied at Duke University. An academic rarity, she triple majored in math, economics and philosophy, and graduated magna cum laude in three years while captaining the equestrian team.

On May 7, 1998 while pursuing a Ph.D. at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, Shannon, 23, was murdered by a serial rapist who pried open a balcony door on her second floor apartment. It would take nearly four years of police bungling before the killer was captured and sentenced to prison for life without parole.

Earlier this year Vicki Schieber testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Saying that both she and her husband were “raised in households where hatred was never condoned,” Vicki dispelled a prevailing myth “that families who suffered this kind of loss will support the death penalty. That assumption is so widespread and so unquestioned that a prosecutor will say to a grieving family, ‘ We will seek the death penalty in order to seek justice for your family.’”

As if they hadn’t suffered enough already, the Schiebers were publicly criticized by a rabid Philadelphia district attorney for daring to oppose the death penalty for their daughter’s murderer. “Responding to one killing with another killing does not honor my daughter,” Vicki Schieber told the Senate, “nor does it help create the kind of society I want to live in, where human life and human rights are valued. I know that an execution creates another grieving family, and causing pain to another family does not lesson my own pain.”

That expression of mercy and logic echoes the thought of Kerry Kennedy, a child of eight when her father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was killed in June 1968: “I saw nothing that could be accomplished in the loss of one life being answered with the loss of another. And I knew, far too vividly, the anguish that would spread through another family—another set of parents, children, brothers and sisters thrown into grief.”

Vicki Schieber recently left her job as an executive director of a trade association to work full-time with the non-profit Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights. Articulate and knowledgeable, she is regularly invited to speak to religious, civic, political and academic groups on capital punishment. As a Catholic, she is aware that large numbers within her own church are pro-death penalty, and that it was only in recent decades that Catholicism began inching away from its traditional death-dealing views and deeds. For centuries, the church went along--often ardently--with the cruelty-driven thinking of Thomas Aquinas: “If any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting it by some sin,” he wrote in the “Summa Theologiae,” the “treatment to be commended is his execution in order the preserve the common good.”

In 1994, eleven years after a majority of Catholic bishops opposed executions--“precisely because life is sacred,” as stated in the pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace”—Cardinal Joseph Bernardin told James Megivern (in “The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey”): “We do not have a large percentage of our people with us….If it really is the case that 75 to 80 percent of our people do not agree, well then, that means we really have a job ahead of us to explain to them why we take this position.”

Vicki Schieber has joined the job. If it means speaking at one parish forum at a time, or one seminary at a time, or one Catholic high school or college at a time, or one priests’ conference at a time, she has the energy. As important, she also has the credibility—based on experience, not theory.