Interview with Brother Richard P. Daly, CSC - page one of five

Date: May 2009

Place: Austin, Texas

Equipment: Sony mini-HD DV camcorder

Recorded on: Sony mini-DV premium cassette tapes

Interviewer: Lydia Crafts

Videographer: Sabina Eva María Hinz-Foley

Transcription: Emmanuel Tomes; Virginia Raymond

Reviewed & edited: Virginia Raymond, Maurice Chammah

Date of this version November 10, 2010 (incorporating Brother Daly's edits)

CRAFTS: We are here at St. Edward’s University with Brother Richard Daly and I’m Lydia Crafts. I am doing the interview. Sabina Hinz-Foley is doing the recording. So you consent to this interview?

RICHARD DALY: Yes.

CRAFTS: Okay. Wonderful. Okay so can you just start by telling us a little about your background, where you grew up?

RICHARD DALY: Well my name is Richard Daly. I grew up in Chicago, believe it or not. Grew up in Chicago and Los Angeles. I moved to Los Angeles when I was in high school. Finished high school out there, joined the Holy Cross Brothers and studied briefly in Wisconsin and then here at St. Edward’s. And after graduating from St. Ed’s, I taught high school for about a dozen years and in the meantime got a Master’s degree in history, undergraduate was History and English. I taught in Florida at Archbishop Curley High School in Miami, Florida where I also coached track. And then I went to Wichita Falls, Texas and taught in the school, ended up being the principal there the last six years I was there. And then came back to St. Ed’s and worked in advancement for a brief time and then went to work for the Texas Catholic Conference for Father John McCarthy who was then the executive director. That was in seventy-four, nineteen seventy-four, and I was there until three years ago. And it was in the context of working for the state Catholic Conference that I first got involved with the death penalty issues, abolition and all the rest of the issues associated with it.

DALY: I might say that, I meant to say this the other night at the panel; it was because of a couple named Charles and Pauline Sullivan that Father McCarthy and I got involved in the abolition movement. And anybody who has been around the death penalty movement in Texas for twenty-five or thirty years would know Charlie and Pauline Sullivan. They founded an organization called CURE, Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants and they started it here in Texas, they went to Washington, they still live in Washington and now they’ve gone international. And so they, like I said, anybody who has been around the death penalty abolition movement would know Charlie and Pauline. They are legendary people, incredible people, are great role models for anybody who is wanting to work in areas around Catholic social teaching and what makes them most remarkable is that they live kind of an evangelical, poverty lifestyle voluntarily. So anyway they’re great people and that’s how I got involved and they convinced us, Father McCarthy and me, that the Texas Catholic Conference in nineteen seventy-four, seventy-five, really ought to be involved in this abolition movement.

CRAFTS: What were your thoughts on the death penalty before you met them and could you also talk a little bit about how you met them and how you got involved and just more about that experience.

RICHARD DALY: Well, Charlie’s an ex-priest and Pauline is a former nun so they gravitated towards the Catholic Conference. They came to us; they came to Father McCarthy. They knew that Father McCarthy—who is a person, a unique individual in his own right, he’s now Bishop McCarthy, he left the conference and became a bishop and he ended up being the bishop of Austin until about ten years ago -- he’s retired. They knew that he was a progressive individual; that he had worked in Washington at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, mainly in other issues, but they knew that he would be sympathetic to their efforts.

DALY: In nineteen seventy-four, this is when not many people were thinking about the death penalty, and in those early years those of us who did talk to legislators about it did it sometimes with some fear and trepidation because there weren’t many abolitionists around at that time. So anyway, there was a Catholic connection. Charlie and Pauline are both former religious and good Catholics and just knew that the Catholic Church would be sympathetic to them, at least the Conference would be.

[ . . . withheld]

and We [the Texas Catholic Conference] took the first position against the death penalty in nineteen seventy-nine but it was a few months after he [Archbishop Francis James Furey] had passed away. When we did pass that resolution among the bishops, at that time there were eleven dioceses and one of the eleven, what we call diocesan bishops, the head bishop in the diocese not the auxiliary or anybody else, he was opposed to it, he was opposed to our taking a position against the death penalty. But the other ten were strongly in favor of it. This was in the context of a pastoral letter the bishops of Texas wrote in nineteen-seventy-nine on the whole criminal justice system called “When did we see you in prison?” and I think I might be able to rescue a copy of that, I don’t know my files are a little bit disorganized

CRAFTS: [inaudible]
RICHARD DALY: -- since, over the last few years. So we had to tweak that statement and so we put in the statement, we said the bishops of Texas, some language that said the bishops of Texas are against the death penalty, but we tweaked it to say something like, "The bishops of Texas are against the death penalty at this time," and that was the compromise we reached with this one bishop who otherwise would not have gone along with the statement, and the bishops never issue a pastoral statement unless they are unanimous on it. So that was in nineteen seventy-nine.

It was about the same time - that was just before the American Bishops, the whole body of bishops in the United States came out with a statement against the death penalty and Texas had a role in that. The bishops, the American, it was then called the United States Conference for Catholic Bishops, it ‘s now called the National Conference for Catholic Bishops, they were, their staff was working on a death penalty statement and they were unable to get, to arrange a visit to a Death Row in the United States, and by this time Father McCarthy had become Bishop McCarthy and was in Houston, and the people in the national office in Washington called him and asked him if he thought it would be possible to get a delegation of bishops and national Bishops Conference staff to visit the Death Row in Texas, which was in the Ellis Unit. I think it's still there in the Ellis Unit, but it may have moved, but the Ellis Unit is where we went. So he called me and asked me if I thought we could do that and said, Well I don't know, but I do know the director of T.D.C. at the time, Texas Department of Corrections, a man named Jim Estelle. And Estelle, I had met Jim Estelle through Charlie and Pauline Sullivan at a hearing on some issue related to the death penalty or criminal justice system, because CURE was involved in other issues besides the death penalty. So I put in a call to Mr. Estelle, left a message and fortunately was in my office kind of late in the evening, early evening, and the phone rang and it was Jim Estelle. And he, I told him who I was and reminded him that we had met and told him what we wanted and he said he thought that he could arrange that. And so he gave me the name of one of his staffers to work with and so we ended up, on June sixteenth, nineteen seventy --, nineteen eighty I guess it was by then. I can remember the date because it was my birthday. We met in Houston, a group of bishops from the around the country and a group of staff, the people who were writing the documents, and we had a little briefing before going up the next morning to the unit and spent the day in the unit, in the Ellis Unit and visited, two of us and one of them, individuals, condemned individuals, and visited the place where they live in the terrible noisy wing where all the, at the time there were only -- I don’t know -- thirty or forty people on Death Row.

And then we ended the day interestingly in the dayroom with a prayer service, with the as many of the men that the unit, the prison people thought could, should be there. And so we had a very moving event, but the most moving part of the day for me was getting out of there. I mean it was, it was, it's not a place you want to spend a lot of time. And I, at the time I had a lot of thoughts about actually visiting the Death Row and talking, and over the years then seeing the names of people that we had visited with come up as, their time had come and the executions were taken on, taken, I tried to talk to Reverend Pickett about a couple of them but we both couldn't remember all the names. So, but I'm sure he accompanied just about every one of those men.

CRAFTS: So could you talk a little bit more about that day and your interactions with the --
RICHARD DALY: Yeah one thing is that when we were talking -- Bishop McCarthy and I were talking to one prisoner, across the glass and so on, and we noticed that the chaplain kept walking back and forth behind all of us outsiders, and we felt very uncomfortable about that. It wasn't Reverend Pickett, but the chaplain kept walking back and forth.

I was struck by the noise in the place. It was June so it was hot and of course East Texas it was humid and it was very uncomfortable. I was struck by the noise, steel, and concrete is all you hear. I'll never forget walking in there and the, and the metal door closing behind us because we were locked in just like everybody else.

I remember walking the hallways and of course the incarcerated had to walk on the other side of a line. We could walk right down the middle of the corridor of course, but they all had to walk, it was like a, I don't know, two foot space, but they had to walk next to the wall all the time and in one direction each way down the hallway.

Having been a high school teacher and having done something that my school board wasn't real happy with when I was up in north Texas I agreed with the juvenile probation office in Wichita County that if they had status offenders in danger of going to the juvenile, the T.Y.C. facility, and they were status offenders -- they were not, they hadn't done any major criminal, if they, what they did if they were adults they wouldn't be in trouble -- but they were runaways and truants and all that. And he had a couple of boys that if they didn't straighten out they were going to have to be put in the Texas Youth Commission, then called the Texas Youth Council facility.
So I agreed to let those boys, one at a time come to our school, and see if they could, it was a Catholic school, and if we could help them out, and unfortunately none of them worked out.

But as I walked through that facility and looked at the people who were in this Texas Department of Corrections unit, some of who were on Death Row, I kind of saw the same faces. They were kind of lost individuals. The kids we were trying to help in Wichita County were, you truants, runaways but you could tell they were, they weren’t, they had no significant home lives. But I was just struck by seeing the same genre of people, now adults, and, compared to the sixteen years olds that I tried to help in Wichita County.

Like I say it wasn't a real popular program with the parents.

CRAFTS: Can you talk about that?
RICHARD DALY: Well, it's just that here you have this nice little private Catholic school and we only, I never took more than one boy at a time and it was very small, it wasn't a big deal. There were some parents who didn't think that we should be having their children associating with these children. But it was not successful, and
I left shortly. I was only there six months or so after that.

And the other thing I remember was the relief of getting out, walking out of there. The beautiful, it set, the Ellis Unit is set, I don't know what it's like now, but it was set in beautiful pastoral countryside and we drove through these wonderful fields and then all of a sudden this facility looms up, you know, and the walls and the barbed wire. And we went in and had this terrible time just, it was just oppressive being in there. But then coming out and being free again, it was —. Anyway I recommend it as a one-time experience.

CRAFTS: Did that experience affect your views in any way?
RICHARD DALY: Yes. I think I was already pretty converted. I don't ever remember being pro-death penalty. I just, what I would recall it wasn't an issue that was on my mind, until I got indoctrinated by Charlie and Pauline Sullivan and others. I guess when I saw who the people that were on Death Row, they were not, they were—. I'm firmly convinced that we don't catch the smart criminals. We catch the criminals who make a lot of mistakes and these were not really clever, bright people, the ones at least, the ones that I met that day and that was a very limited experience, one day on Death Row. But I thought that these people need more help than they need incarceration or execution. And that's— but like I said I didn't really think much about it before—

CRAFTS: Right.

RICHARD DALY: —I got indoctrinated by the Sullivans,

CRAFTS: Right.

RICHARD DALY: —and others.

CRAFTS: So did you have any other opportunities to visit prisons while at the conference or any other --?

RICHARD DALY: Let's see. I don't think so. I had a lot of dealings with—. We would get things like, county jails especially were not permitting religious to go in and teach, to minister. So we spent, I didn't visit a lot of them but we spent a lot of time trying to convince whoever was in charge of the unit, and typically it was a county jail, that it was okay to let a minister go in there and it was even okay to let a Catholic priest go in and celebrate Mass, even though that means bringing a small amount of wine, the very stringent --.

I did visit the Hutto Unit recently in conjunction with Catholic Charities of this diocese, but that’s the only other unit I've ever been in. We did get legislation, by the way, enacted to change the law in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice permitting a small amount of real wine to be brought into a unit for Roman Catholic Mass. You can't have Roman Catholic Mass with grape juice; you have to have wine. And so we did get that changed and that was very helpful when dealing with city and county jails. We could point to the T.D.C. and say they permit it there's no reason you can't permit this small amount of wine.

CRAFTS: Right. Right.

RICHARD DALY: For the Mass. But no those are the only, those two, those were the only times I visited. Probably should have. Worked a lot with, at the conference we had a very strong organization of people who do jail and prison ministry around the state and I would meet with them as executive director once or twice a year and listening to their stories about the people they were working with, men and women, gave me a lot of insights into the criminal—I think it's one of the most selfless ministries in the Catholic Church, people who do jail and prison ministry, including for juveniles. It's tough, it's a tough ministry, and I have great admiration for those men and women who do that. And like I said they're basically all over the state. It's a strong, it was a strong part of the Texas Catholic Conference. Like I said I've been gone for three years I don't know what, too much about what's going on now.

CRAFTS: Can you talk a little bit about that, the priests that you deal with who-

RICHARD DALY: They weren't priests necessarily. There were a couple of priests but they were mainly like deacons and women religious and lay men and lay women, just totally committed, one person at a time. Sometimes those of us who are like school teachers, I am teaching here at St. Edward's now, we think in terms of dealing with a class of twenty or thirty people, dealing with—. But they take time to deal with one individual, with that individual's unique issues. So that's one thing that I came to appreciate is how these people—.

And these are not, sometimes these are not attractive people, people that you want—. They didn't get there because they sang in the choir. Sometimes they're manipulative. But the concern that these men and women ministers had to the people they were trying to minster to was really inspiring. And the success rate is not high. Preventing recidivism ministering to people so that they will not be a recidivist statistic, it's not a real good batting average. But they still stay with it and for years.

CRAFTS: Right. So you became the executive director in nineteen seventy-nine? Is that right?

RICHARD DALY: Yes, Yeah.

CRAFTS: And that was about the time when Texas started executing people again.

RICHARD DALY: Yeah I guess that's right yeah.

CRAFTS: So I know you said that there were ten bishops who were wanting to abolish the death penalty. What about in terms of the Catholic community at that time and sort of that sentiment towards the death penalty?

RICHARD DALY: I think that the Catholic community was certainly pro-death penalty at that time. That bishop ended up retiring fairly quickly and so the bishops, by the time the American bishops took their position, I think it was eighty or eight-one, the Texas bishops were all on board. In fact Archbishop Fiorenza of Houston has been a very, very—. He's retired now, but he's been a very strong opponent of the death penalty and I think he and Sister Helen Prejean have done a little road show together going around and giving talks. Archbishops Joseph Fiorenza is a retired Archbishop of Houston, Galveston, Houston. His replacement was a Cardinal, there's a cardinal in Texas now Cardinal DiNardo.

But by the time the American bishops took their position the Catholic Bishops of Texas were all on board. People, Catholic people I think, have generally reflected, up until recently I'm seeing a little trend, at least when I was still paying attention to the numbers, that Catholics were becoming more anti-death penalty than the general population, it seems to me in the last few years I was involved and with the conference I'm still involved with the death penalty. But I think that the bishop's position has—. People don't always pay attention to all the positions of the bishops but this one they; it seems to be having an effect.

And of course there was a very interesting thing, the Catholic Church historically has been pro death penalty. Think the Inquisition. How did we deal with heretics in the twelfth and thirteenth- we burned them. And the Crusades—. So the church has always, was never against the death penalty because the teaching was that to protect society there are some people that have to be eliminated.

Well of course we have this big thick document called the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which has all of the doctrinal positions of the church and Pope John Paul the second revised parts of that in nineteen ninety-two and that's where they had this change saying the death penalty is never necessary. I forget the exact language I've got it down in my office but they changed the position that sometimes you have to- They said that the church, that society still has a right to protect the common good to take the life of a person who is a danger to the common good. But the Bishops, the Pope, in the Catechism in nineteen ninety-two said that never is necessary. It just -- we don't have to do that because we have very secure prisons and we have good ways of protecting the people at large from these people who do heinous crimes. So that was fairly recently in nineteen ninety-two and that was John Paul the second who was Pope for twenty-seven years. So that's—. That was a major change. That was kind of a watershed event in the church’s view.

I mean the church just says there's never a time when you need to have the death penalty. And of course in Texas when we were able to get life without parole passed, that has caused a significant decline in the number of attorneys seeking the death penalty, district attorneys, county attorneys seeking the death penalty. You know the numbers better than I do but I think there's been a significant decline in the number of attorneys, district attorneys seeking the death penalty in capital cases.

It was interesting I think it was the session, the legislative session in 2001 where there was a lot of activity around the death penalty. I think that's when we passed life without parole if I'm not mistaken but I can't—. Dates—. But we had lots of activity in those years about not executing the mentally retarded, not executing people who were juveniles at the time of the crime and I always felt as though it was the presidential election of two thousand where it became so clear that as governor, Governor Bush had presided over so many executions, including Karla Faye Tucker one of the most, greatest travesties in my opinion in the whole saga.

I think that the people for a slight bit there were some people who were a little bit embarrassed by the reputation of Texas as the most killing state in the nation. I know when I was the director of the conference and I would meet with my colleagues from other states it was difficult to try to answer them, answer people from places like Massachusetts and Delaware, even California and New York—.

Why do Texans execute so many people? It was—. I would just say well it's a wonderful state, I love it but it's not a good place to live if you're poor or if you're convicted of a capital offense. It's just not—. We have some—. I think this came up at the panel the other night. Why is there such a mentality in Texas about the death penalty, pro death penalty? I made a comment that somebody disagreed with, I said I thought it had something to do with the frontier mentality that we still have. I tell my students in political science that we don't do very well in providing health and human services in Texas because we're a “bootstrap” state. Our grandparents and great grandparents—if we're natives, I'm not—pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They didn't need any help from anyone else. So that was kind of like the way you did it on the frontier. But some people, somebody in the audience disagreed with me on that so I would defer to them. It's not because we're bloodthirsty. I do think that there are some—.

Well it's clear that most of the people on Death Row and most of the people who have been executed have come from two counties in Texas: Dallas and Harris. And who is in the office of district attorney in those jurisdictions makes a difference. And there were people in those offices that were very pro-death penalty seek the death penalty on many occasions.

I think we cannot discount the issue of racism in the death penalty environment. I think it's a sin that we still have in our society. And it is a sin. Going back to the Catechism of the Catholic Church if you look at the definition of sin in that document I think you can apply it to racism. And that's a big topic we don't want to get into.

Anyway I don't know where, I'm wondering off here but I think that we did have a flurry of activity around the death penalty issue because of the spotlight that was shown on Texas when Governor Bush was running for president successfully.

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