Supporters of the death penalty celebrate an execution at the prison in Huntsville,
Texas.
Protestors rally against the execution of Gary Graham in Texas (June 2000).
“It’s about paying for your sins and creating some sort of equilibrium: a life is
taken, and therefore another life should be taken” |
On the eve of the U.S.
presidential elections, the death penalty–repudiated by almost all democratic nations–is
notable only for its absence from debate. Abolitionists are changing their tactics
to ‘win over’ a majority
 Though the legal battle was arduous, Gary
Gilmore eventually got what he had longed for on January 17, 1977. Tied by nylon
rope to an office chair, with a white target disc pinned to his chest, the petty
thief and lovesick murderer stared down the barrels of five state rifles. After ten
idle years, the firing squad in a Utah jailhouse sent a signal around the world:
executions in the United States were back.
Since Gilmore’s landmark demise–hastened by his own preference for death in place
of jail–a further 663 people have followed, killed by lethal injections, electric
currents or poison gas administered on judicial orders. What started in the late
1970s as a dribble of ill-fated convicts had, by the turn of the century, become
a regular feature of the nation’s public life, played out to a peculiar combination
of silence from U.S. politicians and last-ditch pleas for clemency from the European
Union, Amnesty International and other moral bulwarks of the West.
The contrast with the rest of the democratic world–of which the United States considers
itself the leader–is more marked on the issue of the death penalty than possibly
any other aspect of domestic policy. While U.S. foreign policy bears down on “rogue
states,” its executioners keep good rhythm with the likes of Iran and Iraq (though
remain way behind group leader, China). When a proposed worldwide moratorium on the
penalty came up for debate in the UN Human Right Commission in April 1999, the U.S.
predictably voted against, along with Cuba, China, Sudan and nine other nations.
Some 108 countries, on the other hand, have in law or in practice abolished the punishment,
with Turkmenistan and Ukraine among the most recent to enlist.
The appeal
of tough justice
For the average high-level
U.S. politician, however, the death penalty has only minor administrative defects,
if any at all. Of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates lining up
in elections on November 7, all support the punishment–from Democrat candidate Al
Gore to Republican George W Bush, who has ratcheted up its use in his last five years
as Texas governor, granting only one reprieve and rubber-stamping 144 executions.
Public support for the penalty, in spite of a major new abolitionist offensive that
has helped cut approval ratings from a high of 80 per cent, still hovers over 60
per cent.
“I call it the silver bullet, in reference to the Lone Ranger [a U.S. television
series set in the Wild West],” explains Robert Bohm, a professor in criminology and
death penalty expert from the University of Central Florida. “A lot of people in
this country who are very fearful of crime, whether rationally or not, are looking
for a silver bullet to deal with it–and the death penalty is a very attractive bullet.”
A host of arguments, used previously by philosophers as venerable as Thomas Aquinas
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, have helped make the penalty an emblem of tough justice.
Despite a lack of agreed data, defenders of capital punishment in the U.S. argue
that the system is cheap, acts as a deterrent and prevents supposedly “liberal” parole
boards from releasing jailed murderers into an unsuspecting world–a practice that
Dudley Sharp, from the Justice For All project, says has led to 10,000 killings since
1971. Above all else, the penalty is vaunted as the only true outlet for a society
outraged by heinous crimes; as Rousseau wrote, “in killing the criminal, we destroy
not so much a citizen as an enemy.”
In response, a new generation of abolitionists has quietly shed its moral indignation.
No longer are the lives of serial killers and sociopaths held to be inherently worth
preserving. Instead, press-friendly groups like the Death Penalty Information Centre
stress the injustices of its application, from the racial inequities that it breeds
to the risk that innocents might be slaughtered.
For the Centre’s director, Richard Dieter, this strategy aims to conquer America’s
famed middle ground, that majority of people who seem to support the penalty without
great conviction or passion. “The death penalty seems to have all this baggage, all
these problems –innocent people, international opposition, unfairness, racial problems,”
he argues. “That’s a lot of baggage, and it may not be worth it.” In January, to
Dieter’s delight, Illinois’ Republican governor shelved the penalty over concerns
that innocent people might be executed. The governor, fittingly, had been a lifelong
supporter of capital punishment.
Miguel Angel Martinez is one of around 3,600 inmates whose life is at stake. In 1992,
a Texan court found the prospective Air Force cadet guilty of murdering three men
in a gang knife assault–an attack in which his new lawyer insists he was a “bit player.”
He was sentenced to death at the age of 17, four years before he was legally entitled
to drink beer.
Writing from what he terms the “man-made hell” of Terrell Unit in Texas, Martinez
says he harbours hopes for the new abolition campaign. But death row has razed all
his faiths. Religion he sees as a “hollow vessel,” while society is a place of hate:
“you know, there is still an actual conditioning in people to accept punishment even
when other options exist . . . We are all sadists and masochists to a degree.”
For many outside the United States, it is precisely this unnecessary cruelty that
taints the death penalty, even though the same countries that now scorn the punishment
enjoyed their own illustrious moments with the noose, guillotine and hatchet man.
British law–which heavily influenced practice in its colonies–was bent on execution.
By the 18th century, for instance, 222 crimes were punishable by death in Britain,
including robbing a rabbit warren and cutting down a tree. The public, in turn, liked
nothing better than a picnic at the gallows. When one notorious murderer was hanged
in 1807 in London, 40,000 people turned up, though an ensuing mass frenzy killed
a hundred of them.
Following World War II and the spread of codified human rights, many nations reconsidered,
then scrapped the penalty. But the United States proved an exception to the rule:
even in the ten-year hiatus from 1967 to Gilmore’s execution, courts and states,
acting on a temporary plunge in the penalty’s popularity, shunned what one Supreme
Court justice termed the “machinery of death” instead of dismantling it outright.
Indeed when the Supreme Court issued its Furman vs Georgia rulings in 1972, declaring
the penalty to be “cruel and unusual,” furious southern state legislators busied
themselves with redrafting their statutes to accommodate the Court’s objections.
As violent crime climbed steeply upwards in the recession-hit 1970s, a new-look death
penalty was ready and waiting in several state law books. Some 38 states now feature
the sentence in their penal codes, while around three per cent of the nation’s convicted
murderers are dispatched to death row.
Victims’
rights and the draw of opinion polls
Underlying this penchant
for capital punishment–particularly marked in eight southern states, home to 90 per
cent of recent executions–appears a deep-rooted sense of what justice means. When
Alan Wolfe, a Boston University politics professor, went to Texas to research opinions
towards the 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker, he was astonished by the response:
rather than feel pity for the cheery 38-year-old inmate who had repented and “found
God,” most people believed death to be perfect retribution for her pickaxe slaying
of an ex-lover.
“I think it touched on a very basic, fundamental view of society that people have,
that is pre-political and pre-religious, that has to do with an inherent sense of
what justice means,” says Wolfe. “It’s about paying for your sins and creating some
sort of equilibrium: a life is taken, and therefore another life should be taken.”
Retribution and scant pity for the murderer dominate the thinking of those who fervently
back the penalty–especially the victims’ relatives. The first relative allowed under
a new Texan law in 1996 to witness the execution of the murderer recalled how “I
would like to have seen him humiliated a bit. I think he should have been brought
in and strapped down in front of us.” In radio talks shows across the land, callers
demand that killers be “fried” so they can “meet Hitler.”
The irony is that this atavistic sense of justice is so out of synch with other trends
in U.S. culture. Most Christian teachings point to the importance of forgiveness,
and most Americans are practising Christians. Daytime television has made therapy,
and its motifs of confessing past sins and reinvention, central to people’s lives.
But murder and punishment, above all in the south, still follow the dictates of an
“eye for an eye.” And while violent crimes soared over the past two decades, claiming
the lives of 500,000 Americans (with around 17,000 murders a year at present) and
drawing gruesome media coverage, adherence to this philosophy of uncomplicated vengeance
grew inexorably. The victim–and concepts of victimhood–now stand at the heart of
the modern U.S. death penalty, whether in the sentencing phase of the murder trial,
when bereaved relatives take the stand, or in state politicians’ rhetoric. “If the
debate is just over the penalty or not the death penalty,” sighs Dieter, “it’s like
asking whether you’re for criminals or victims.”
Public opinion in countries like Britain or France, however, was hardly very different.
In almost all cases, clear majorities supported the penalty, though political leaders
resolved to push through with abolition all the same. Politicians in the United States,
on the other hand, have been unwilling or unable to emulate these feats. The generation
that was so closely linked to the civil rights era–the Kennedys, Martin Luther King–may
have been equipped to do so, but its figureheads were fated to die early. Meaningful
debate has been further impeded by the penalty’s deployment at state level, often
boxing the issue into a local crime perspective, and by the absence of other proposals
such as gun control or poverty programmes, ruled out by costs and lobbies. But more
than any other factor, it is what observers see as the frenetic nature of U.S. democracy,
with its comparatively weak political parties, incessant elections and hyper-sensitivity
to opinion polls, that has exposed candidates to constant courting of voters’ hunches.
The price of opposing the penalty became evident in the mishaps of Michael Dukakis,
Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, who turgidly repeated his opposition to
the penalty when asked what he would do if his wife and children were slain and thus
was branded “weak” on crime. All politicians swiftly learnt that support for the
penalty, though it may not have mattered to them much as an issue, was a vote-securing
synonym for “toughness” on crime. For elected district attorneys (local prosecutors),
who often later become judges, exploitation of the issue became rife. “It’s a quick
way to get on television and get your name in the paper,” says Michael Mears, from
the Georgia Indigent Defense Council. “It’s a placebo for the public, like giving
the patient a sugar-coated tablet.”
With victims occupying the moral high ground and politicians unable to draw themselves
away from the glitter of a poll booster, the practical tack taken by the new abolitionists
seems sensible. Already they appear to have convinced the majority of the American
public that innocent lives may have been shed. Dieter’s centre lists 87 people exonerated
from death row since the penalty’s reinstatement, while several DNA tests are currently
underway in an effort to discover the first scientific confirmation of an executed
innocent.
Racial bias in imposition of the death penalty has provided yet further ammunition
for the punishment’s opponents. Although black murderers are proportionately under-represented
on death row, there is undeniable statistical evidence showing that death penalties
are imposed almost entirely (over 80 percent) when victims are white. In Georgia,
meanwhile, Mears reports that only one out of 159 district attorneys is black. For
many campaigners, says criminology professor Robert Bohm, the penalty is simply “a
new form of social control that replaced slavery.”
Calls for
a moratorium
In the case of Martinez,
prejudice (he is Mexican-American), poverty, and the fact that an accomplice’s father
was a local judge appeared to have vitiated all chance of leniency. Indeed his legal
saga reads like a litany of the death penalty’s iniquities: his trial lasted five
days, the alleged accomplices are free, and a large part of the local district attorney’s
office has since been sacked for taking bribes. “It is like two people playing chess,
one who is very good at it and another who is just learning how the pieces move,”
he recalls of his trial.
His case and others have led campaigners to hope a moratorium may be called as the
“silver bullet” is sullied by procedural failure, and maybe buried by a richer variety
of crime policies. Sceptics for their part warn that the machinery of death could
just be reinvented in a sleeker, “fairer” guise. But one thing seems clear: if the
penalty goes, it will not go at the behest of an ethical revolution. As Wolfe argues,
“if you leave out the morality entirely, I think Americans would be very sympathetic
to halting or at least slowing capital punishment.”
To know more
• www.prodeathpenalty.com supporting the death penalty
• www.deathpenaltyinfo.org Death Penalty Information Centre
• www.miguelangelmartinez.com website of Miguel Angel Martinez
• www.knoware.nl/users/annegr/deadman/talking.htm articles by death row inmate
Dean Carter
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