US prisoners on death row can't wait to die, a speaker for the World Alliance of Reformed Churches told the UN commission on human rights in Geneva during its annual meeting in April.

Rev Melodee A Smith instanced the case of a Cuban refugee, Jesus Angel Delgado, who on April 4 tried to hang himself in his Florida prison cell. He was protesting a decision by the state of Florida to stop contact visits to convicts on death row, his suicide note said. He might be condemned to die, but that did not mean that the state should bury him alive.

The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, so Delgado still awaits his executioners.

"Hear the cries of those who are suffering because we, as a worldwide community, have not abolished the death penalty or have not even established, through courageous moral leadership in support of human rights, a moratorium," Ms Smith, network facilitator of the international clergy coalition to end executions, asked the commission.

In 1989, at its 22nd general council in Seoul, Korea, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches called for the universal abolition of the death penalty.

It called upon its member churches

to promote the abolition of the death penalty in their country;
to provide legal assistance to people facing the threat of capital punishment; and
to minister with those who are under sentence of death, victims of crime, and families of victims and of those on death row.

In the same year (1989), Melodee Smith graduated from Harvard University divinity school, having also read law in Michigan. Since then she has worked with death row inmates and their families and with the families of murder victims, combining a ministry of pastoral care with legal services for the poor. "For me," she says, "it's not just a question of being successful. It's about being faithful."

Melodee Smith is a minister of the United Church of Christ and co-chair of the UCC national coalition for the abolition of the death penalty. This is the second year running that she has addressed the UN commission on human rights on behalf of WARC.

Ms Smith urged the commission to support international demands for a universal moratorium on executions.

She told the commission of Larry Robison, killed this year by the state of Texas.

A paranoid schizophrenic who for years was denied treatment "because he had never been violent", Larry killed five people. He spent 17 years on death row, still without treatment. In the end, he refused to appeal against sentence on any grounds other than clemency. Only moments before his execution on January 21, Governor George Bush denied him that clemency.

To execute a mentally incompetent prisoner in the state of Texas is a violation of state, federal and international law.

Ms Smith also told the commission of SueZann Bosler. With her father, Rev William Bosler, she was attacked by a thief who broke into their home in the night.

Bill Bosler died after being stabbed 33 times.

But both he and his daughter believed that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezek 33.11), so SueZann spent 10 years fighting the state of Florida to get her father's killer off death row - and finally won.

WARC member churches in the USA have a long history of opposition to the death penalty. The United Church of Christ rejected capital punishment in 1979. The Presbyterian Church (USA) did the same in 1985, referring back to earlier statements by the United Presbyterian Church (1959) and the Presbyterian Church US (1966).

Other WARC churches are also active on the issue. The Presbyterian Church of Korea (PCK) recently appealed to President Kim Dae-jung to stay the execution of 36 prisoners on death row and to examine the possibility of commuting their sentences.

Capital punishment often kills the innocent, the PCK says. In the case of the guilty, it cuts off any possibility of repentance and reform.

Páraic Réamonn