Injection of Reflection

[question everything]

Injection of Reflection

There's wide support for a death penalty, but those who carry it out are increasingly uncomfortable.
By Evan Thomas and Martha Brant
NEWSWEEK


Texas has long been the Hang 'em high state. In 2000, it executed convicted prisoners at the rate of almost one a week. Gov. George W. Bush seemed to take pride in turning down appeals for clemency. The "Decider" was known for spending as little as 15 minutes reviewing a death case. In a Talk magazine piece, Tucker Carlson reported that Bush mocked the plea of one double murderer on death row, pursing his lips in mock desperation and whispering, "Please, don't kill me." (Bush later said Carlson had "misread, mischaracterized me.")

Texas still accounts for more than half of all executions in the United States. But a strange thing is happening in the state that has executed more prisoners than any other since the U.S. Supreme Court revived the death penalty in 1976 after a brief hiatus. Texas prosecutors are less willing to seek, and juries are less willing to grant, capital punishment for aggravated murder. In 2006, only 15 Texas convicts were sentenced to death, down from 34 a decade earlier. Texas mirrors a national trend: death-penalty sentences in the 38 states that allow capital punishment dropped from 317 in 1996 to 128 in 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available.

Why the reluctance to populate death row? Polls show popular support for capital punishment stays relatively high, at about 65 percent. But when it comes to carrying out death sentences, the people involved — judges and juries, prosecutors and prison officials — are starting to recoil, or at least pull back. What is acceptable in theory seems less and less tolerable in practice. Indeed, the Supreme Court has called at least a temporary halt to executions while it examines the fine points of killing convicts by pumping lethal chemicals into their veins. "The death penalty may go out with a whimper, not a great moral revolution," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

(snip)

Jurors and prosecutors are steering away from the death penalty because they are both more and less afraid: more apprehensive about killing the innocent and less fearful of crime. Over the past decade, the use of DNA testing on wrongly convicted criminals has overturned prison sentences for at least 200 inmates nationwide (about 15 of them sentenced to death). In 2000, Illinois declared a moratorium on executions after 13 death-row inmates were exonerated. Back in the '80s, when violent crime was surging along with crack-cocaine addiction in cities, Americans demanded retributive justice. But as crime rates fell in the '90s and the first few years of the new century, jurors became more lenient in capital cases.

At the same time, prosecutors began to be wary of seeking the death penalty. A series of court decisions required that more states provide competent lawyers for the criminally accused in death-penalty cases. Better defense lawyers could stall and maneuver, running up the cost to the state of bringing a capital case. The more-clever lawyers have been especially good at introducing "mitigating circumstances" into these cases, arguing that the abuse suffered by the killer as a child helps to explain the horrible crime he or she committed. Since 1982, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a think tank, the state has spent more than $250 million on the death penalty, or about $11 million a year—without executing a single prisoner. With legal costs soaring in death cases, states are finding it cheaper to pay for lifetime prison sentences. In many states, jurors chose the death penalty because they feared the convicted murderer might get out on parole and kill again. But in Texas, and many other states, jurors can now sentence the convicted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

(snip)


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/69546

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

1. If apartheid South Africa could end executions, I would like to believe we can

In the 1980's South Africa hanged on average 120 people a year, 7 at a time. At the end of 1989 de Klerk halted executions and they never resumed despite widespread public support.

If APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA could do it, I would really like to believe the United States can.

[question everything]

2. The United States is the only developed country

that still carries the death penalty.

So we have more in common with Russia, and Saudi Arabia and China than we have with Britain, France and Canada.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

3. I don't believe Russia has executed anyone in a decade,

Japan still hangs a couple of people a year in a strange ritual to ensure no justice minister serves without presiding over an execution