The death penalty: America's peculiar form of 'legal homicide'

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'The capitalist class has always relied on the death penalty when it feels threatened. The rate of executions peaked in the 1930s when mass unemployment led to SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1990 3 Scattered across America over 2000 healthy people, mainly in their 20s and 30s, are contemplating their date with death. They are the men (and a few women) sentenced to death by hanging, poison gas, electrocution, or lethal injection. Twenty seven were 16 or 17 when their alleged crimes were committed.

Death row in American prisons is not a brief stopping place on the road to swift and certain execution. Rather it is a purgatory stretching into years of soul-destroying anxiety and uncertainty. It is a place of unbearable tension, with the prospect of death looming close, then receding—only to confront the condemned prisoner once again.

This is because death sentences must be appealed to higher courts, a process taking months and years. It is not uncommon for prisoners to occupy death row for five years or more as appeal after appeal is filed. Even as the condemned person is walking his last mile, a stay of execution might return him or her to their cell, their ultimate fate still undecided.

This is how capital punishment is applied in America, almost the only country in the West still inflicting the sentence of death for civil crimes.

This long, tortuous road from the death cell to the gallows reflects the ambivalence in American society about the death penalty. Some polls indicate support for the death penalty as an "ultimate deterrent." But there is a strong reluctance to actually take the life of another human being.

Statistics bear this out. It is estimated that over 100 executions a year took place from 1890 to 1950. By 1960, the yearly average was down to 50. After that, the number steadily dwindled until 1967, when a moratorium ended all executions while constitutional questions were considered.

"Cruel and unusual punishment"

In 1972, in the Furman v. Georgia case, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty, as applied, violated the Eighth Amendment barring "cruel and unusual punishment." It was unconstitutional, the justices said, because the small number of capital offenders (out of 20,000 homicides a year) actually executed were chosen "capriciously" and "freakishly," with no rules for applying the law.

This ruling lifted temporarily the shadow of death hanging over some 600 men on death row at that time.

Meanwhile, foes of the death penalty have brought to the Supreme Court more arguments for ending capital punishment. One is the admitted bias against Black defendants. From 1930 to today, 3865 persons have been put to death; 2067, over half, were Black. This is five times the proportion of Blacks in the population.

When a Black kills a white person the penalty is often death—but not when whites kill Blacks. Out of 15,000 executed murderers, only 30 have been white men who killed Blacks.

Capital punishment fails as a deterrent. It has been demonstrated that the number of murders actually rises slightly in the weeks following a well publicized execution. In New Orleans in 1988, the murder rate from July to September rose 17 percent despite a series of eight executions in that period.

The argument that it is cheaper to kill prisoners than keep them in jail has been proven false. A New York study showed that the cost of trial and appeal averaged $1.8 million, iwice the cost of life imprisonment. In California the cost of a capital case has been estimated to be $4.5 million.

Making executions seem

"humane"

The strongest obstacle to the immediate wholesale execution of 2000 condemned people is the cultural level humanity has reached. Public opinion will no longer tolerate barbarities accepted in the past—eyegouging wrestling matches, public flogging and torture, or public executions.

In 1936, at the last public execution, SUPREME 20,000 people came out in Kentucky to see a Black man hanged. Would such a spectacle be tolerated today? America is in many ways a kinder, gentler nation, despite Bush and his supporters who want to extend the death penalty to drug pushers and 23 other types of mass discontent.

offenders.

Even those state governors who push for the death penalty strive to make the infliction of death seem more "humane." Some have adopted a lethal injection in a hospitallike setting. They suggested that a physician should inject the fatal dose. But the American Medical Association refused, saying the Hippocratic Oath commanded physicians to save lives, not to kill.

The Supreme Court was not responding to these calls for more humanity in the justice system when it considered the death penalty.

The rate of executions peaked in the 1930s when mass unemployment led to mass discontent. Southern states have used the death penalty more than any other region. The It was listening to the rulers of America who feel the latent hostility of the working class.

The capitalist class has always relied on the death penalty when it feels threatened.

heirs of the slavocracy use it to terrorize Black people.

The Supreme Court did not declare capital punishment itself unconstitutional, only the way it was applied. State courts continued to impose sentences of death, while legislatures amended penal laws to meet Supreme Court Opponents of the death penalty staged a vigil before the gates of San Quentin prison on Dec. 16. Over 250 men are awaiting execution in the prison's gas chamber.

Nuns and priests, members of Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Coalition to oppose the Death Penalty were among the demonstrators. The wife of a condemned prisoner and two men who had spent years on death row also participated.

A line of armed guards blocked off the road to the prison gates as though they expected these gentle folk to storm the walls. But there was no confrontation, as speakers addressed the problem of the state executions to show that "killing people is wrong."

Petitions with 70,000 signatures have been submitted to Gov. George Deukmejian calling for the end to executions in California. His response has been to propose restrictions on the right of appeal so as to speed up the procession of 250 men to the gas chamber!

requirements. They did this by making the death penalty mandatory for certain crimes, or by laying down detailed rules for guiding judges and juries. Meanwhile the number on death row rose to over 2300.

In 1976, the Supreme Court lifted the ban on executions by declaring that the disproportionate number of Blacks executed was irrelevant, and upheld the revamped deathpenalty laws of Florida, Georgia, and Texas.

Nixon's appointment of conservatives helped swing the Court to a pro-death position. Reagan's appointments made the Court majority a veritable panel of 18th-century "hanging judges." In a series of decisions, the Court ruled that judges may overrule jury decisions and impose a death sentence and that death-penalty opponents can be kept off juries.

One of the more egregious rulings declared that it was all right to execute boys who were as young as 16 when their alleged crimes were committed. It also affirmed that mentally impaired people could be executed.

To speed the 2000 condemned on their way, former Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell and a panel of jurists has proposed to limit Supreme Court reviews of state trials. The historic right to the writ of habeas corpus would be curtailed. This would have a devastating effect.

The execution of an innocent person can never be reversed. There can be no compensation for those wrongfully executed. Yet the justices propose that prisoners fighting for their lives should have fewer avenues of appeal than a corporation defending its profits. Appeals to higher courts are far from frivolous. Judges have reversed death sentences on constitutional grounds in 75 percent of the appeals filed.

If the Bush administration and the Supreme Court majority have their way, the United States will witness a rash of legal homicides, as over 2200 condemned prisoners are executed and new batches of capital offenders are sent by the courts to fill up the death rows again.

Activities against the death penalty But there are countervailing forces. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have abolished the death penalty. In a number of states with the death penalty on the books, no one has been executed for 20 or more years.

Thirty religious denominations have joined in a campaign of "Lighting the Torch of Conscience" to cast light on the scandal of America's death rows. In California, where 250 condemned prisoners crowd death row, "Death Penalty Focus" of California engages in marches and prison gate vigils to publicize and protest imminent executions.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Amnesty International, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference are other organizations actively working to end all legal homicides.

While the moratorium on executions prevailed, public interest in the question was muted. But now that the executioners are once more at work, it is time to declare loud and clear that the death penalty is legalized murder—a relic of a less civilized past that will should no longer be tolerated in this country.

The vigil was part of a nationwide effort to stem the rush to legal homicide that threatens to put the United States in the class of states like Iran. It is also part of Amnesty International's worldwide campaign to secure an international standard of human rights.

Michael Bauman, leader of "Death Penalty Focus," said he sees a growing opposition to legal homicide. The resumption of executions has set alarm bells ringing. Only the "lesser people," he noted, are selected for gas chambers.

Activists against the death penalty are making themselves as visible as possible. On Oct. 15, they started a 70-mile march from Sacramento, the state capital, to San Quentin. It was interrupted halfway by the Oct. 17 earthquake. Now that the shaking has stopped, they plan to take up the march again.

They also intend to demonstrate at San Quentin every time a prisoner is sent to the gas chamber by a murderous state extracting vengeance.

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