By Gretchen Keiser, Staff Writer

ATLANTA--Archbishop John F. Donoghue asked the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles for clemency for Death Row Inmate Nicholas Lee Ingram.

The board ruled April 4 to proceed with Ingram’s death in the electric chair, which was carried out the evening of April 7 at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center in Jackson.

Ingram, 31, British born and the holder of dual citizenship in the U.S. and Great Britain, was convicted in November 1983 of murdering Cobb County resident J.C. Sawyer and wounding his wife, at their Marietta home in 1982.

British corespondents traveled to Georgia to report on the execution because of intense public interest and reported opposition in Great Britain to the death penalty. In England the death penalty has been abolished since 1965, except for rare cases of piracy and treason, news reports said.

In an April 3 letter to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, Archbishop Donoghue said that the Catholic Church recognizes the state’s authority to maintain public order and defend the community “against aggressors.” However, he said that the death penalty does not accomplish rehabilitation of the offender and “violates the inherent dignity of the human person.”

In a separate interview Archbishop Donoghue said that he views opposition to use of the death penalty as consistent with the pro-life stance of the Catholic Church. A sentence of life in prison without parole can protect society from violent offenders without execution, he noted. “If you believe in the sanctity of human life, how can you justify executing someone, even a murderer?”

In 1992 the bishops of the Province of Atlanta, including Archbishop Donoghue, then bishop of Charlotte, N.C., issued a statement opposing the use of capital punishment.

The Province of Atlanta includes Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Archbishop Donoghue in his interview also cited the statement of Pope John Paul II in his newly released encyclical Evangelium Vitae. The pope wrote that the use of the death penalty should be restricted to “cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.”

Today, however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent,” the papal encyclical says.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the encyclical will lead to a strengthening and revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the topic of opposition to the use of the death penalty.