Considering Life and Death

Kaitlyn Marie Wise was killed on Valentine’s Day, 2023. She was 29 years old and lived in Lebanon, Marion County, Kentucky. On May 13, 2024, more than a year later, Dailin Marquez Brown-Graves, age 23, was arrested and charged with murder. He has pleaded not guilty. She is white; he is Black. The Kentucky Commonwealth is seeking the death penalty. The trial is set for Nov. 25 here in Marion County.

The death penalty is wrong. Jesus instructs us to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds and to love our neighbors as ourselves. This teaching is at the center of our lives. Our very purpose is to reflect back to God all the beauty and goodness we are surrounded with. Some people don’t have the gifts we’ve received and again, our job is to share this goodness that we know. 

And still we take life. We’re each of us capable of murder. Some of our taxes go to war. Some of our brothers and sisters go to war. We are surrounded by accounts of the horrors of war, of gun violence, of cruelty and threats of cruelty. And some of our taxes go to carry out the death penalty.

The death penalty is different from war or murder or abortion or even suicide. The death penalty is not an action taken out of fear or impulse or desperation. The crime has happened

and it has happened to other people, not to the prosecutor and jury, much less the state legislature. The presumed perpetrator has been caught and is not a threat. In choosing to execute a person, we deny everything that God has taught us about the sacredness of life, its beauty and preciousness. We take all that away from another person in full deliberate consciousness. This is not loving our neighbor as ourselves.

In considering the death penalty, I haven’t written about the victim, Kaitlyn Wise, who left two children behind. I haven’t considered if Dailin Brown-Graves is guilty. I haven’t looked at the cost of the death penalty, the burden on the executioner, the trauma on the family of the victim as well as the family of the one found guilty. I haven’t considered the hope of healing from a life spent in prison.

None of those things are ours to consider. Kaitlyn Wise’s family must live with grief. Dailin Brown-Graves and the prosecutor and the jury must be guided by their own truths and responsibilities.

We who are the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky must stand for life. That’s our job. That’s what it means to be a child of God. We must reject the death penalty because the judgement of life and death doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to God.

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This piece was submitted to the Lebanon Enterprise.