Groups Mourn 30 Years of the Death Penalty in the

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US

By Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
June 30, 2006

(CNSNews.com) - The United Methodist Church and Amnesty International marked Friday's 30th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing capital punishment to continue in the U.S. with a vigil outside the nation's high court, calling on the public to "remember the victims, but not with more killing." But the groups' detractors say the proper venue to debate the death penalty would be the constitutional amendment process, not before the Supreme Court.

Bill Pelke, whose grandmother was murdered and saw her killer sentenced to death, called for "compassion."

"This is what murder victim families need, they don't need revenge, they don't need to see another life taken, they need healing," Pelke said.

Larry Peterson, who spent 19 years on death row for murder but was exonerated last month, added, "If there was death, you can never correct the error that has been made, but if you give someone life, you can find out later that they were innocent and you can go back and correct the error that was made."

Almost 3,400 people are currently sitting on death row. Since 1976 there have been 1,029 people executed, and since 1973, Amnesty International claims that 123 death row inmates have been exonerated.

The United Methodist Church (UMC) says they were the first church to come out against capital punishment.

"Fifty years ago, the United Methodist Church gave a bold yes to life," said UMC Bishop Ray Chamberlain, "and a resounding no to the death penalty.

"Fifty years ago we said no to capital punishment because it is morally indefensible to deliberately destroy life. 'No' we said to the death penalty which is shear retribution. We said 'no' to the state devaluing life to the ultimate extreme. We said 'no' to the state continuing the cycle of violence by killing the one who kills," Chamberlain said.

"We said it then, and we say it now," Chamberlain said.

Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International, called capital punishment the "ultimate cruel and inhumane degrading punishment."

Cox added that it is "arbitrary, racially biased and unfair," referring to claims that the system targets minorities.

"African Americans are disproportionately represented among people condemned to death in the USA," Amnesty International claims on its website. "While they make up 12 per cent of the national population, they account for more than 40 per cent of the country's current death row inmates, and one in three of those executed since 1977."

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, African-Americans were charged with committing 36.9 percent of all violent crimes that might have been eligible for the death penalty in 2004, the most recent year for which nationwide statistics were available.

Phyllis Schlafly, president of Eagle Forum, argues that the Supreme Court is not the proper venue to debate the death penalty.

"If they want to get rid of the death penalty, well, they are perfectly free to propose an amendment to the Constitution to do that," she said.

Schlafly told Cybercast News Service that she agrees with the Constitution.

"The United States Constitution authorizes the death penalty," Schlafly concluded, "and anyone who wants to change that is perfectly free to get someone in Congress to pass an amendment and get it ratified. Let them go for it."

Source:

www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200606/CUL20060630b.html

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by BRUCE SHAPIRO, The Nation

Thirty years ago this summer, the Supreme Court pondered a double murder committed in the course of a robbery in Georgia.

On a November day in 1973, Troy Gregg had shot Fred Simmons and Bob Moore and left their bodies in a ditch. Troy Gregg was a petty thief, but those murders, and the fragmented opinion announced on July 2, 1976, in Gregg v Georgia, changed the fundamental nature of American justice. A few months before Gregg's crime, an earlier Supreme Court majority had shut down death rows nationwide. Now Gregg the murderer and Gregg the case put American government back in the business of killing.

It's easy to tally the numerical consequences of Gregg v Georgia: At the time I write, 1,026 executions, with 41 percent of African-American or Hispanic inmates; 858 lethal injections, 152 electrocutions, eleven gassings, three hangings, two firing squads; 123 death-row exonerations.

But there's also another sort of accounting. No decision since Plessy v Ferguson has so tormented--or so politicized--the American judicial system. Roe v Wade, far better known, may have ignited a generation of antiabortion fanatics, but in the courts Roe's central findings have been affirmed time and time again. Coming to terms with Gregg, on the other hand, continues to turn the justice system inside out, whether the subject is innocence, race, lawyering or even the method of execution itself.

Less than a week before Gregg's thirtieth anniversary, for instance, the collegiality of the new Roberts Court was shattered by a case over the death penalty in Kansas. In a 5-4 majority opinion written by Clarence Thomas, the Court ruled constitutional Kansas's policy making the death penalty the
"default sentence" in cases where juries can't decide between life terms and capital punishment. Dissenter David Souter, citing those 123 exonerations as evidence of the death penalty's fallibility, called his colleagues' position "obtuse by any moral or social measure." Justice Scalia shot back that death penalty opponents could not provide "a single verifiable case" of an
innocent inmate put to death.

Scalia probably did not read the June 25 Chicago Tribune before sending his diatribe to the printer. If he had, he would have seen exactly what he said doesn't exist: meticulous and persuasive documentation that in 1989, Texas executed an innocent parolee, Carlos DeLuna, despite the real killer bragging to friends and family of his crime and prosecutors knowing about him. It's in fact the fourth case of probable innocence in a dead inmate--a
subject so far off the national radar that at this writing not a single national newspaper has reported the Tribune's wrong-man revelation.

The Kansas case which inspired Scalia's and Souter's sparring rested on just one "technicality" of the complex capital-sentencing system. But technicality--legal and even medical--is Gregg's legacy. In Gregg, the Supreme Court majority said capital punishment could be fairly applied provided that the judicial system embrace an elaborate series of procedures--among them separate trial and penalty phases, aggravating and mitigating factors. Gregg proposed that the messy business of killing be
moderated by cool bureaucratic courtroom mechanisms.

The states which revived capital punishment in Gregg's wake took this mechanistic approach from the courtroom to the execution chamber. Beginning with Oklahoma most states replaced the brutal violence of the gallows or electric chair with the clinical silence of lethal injection: a poisonous thingytail, sometimes administered by machine, which amounts to a what
Columbia University anesthesiologist Mark Heath calls a "chemical veil," freezing the dying inmate's features into a mask of tranquility, despite what may sometimes be hideous pain.

That "chemical veil" is now itself at the center of the death penalty debate. Earlier this spring, the Supreme Court agreed that enough evidence exists that lethal injection may not mask pain to permit numerous challenges to execution protocols as cruel and unusual punishment. Indeed the same day that Souter and Scalia faced off over innocence, a federal judge in Missouri
put all executions in that state on hold because of his belief that lethal injection violates the Eighth Amendment. (In Missouri, the lethal injections are mixed by an unnamed medical doctor--an interesting interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath. The role of medical professionals--doctors and pharmacists--in lethal injection protocols nationwide is yet another hidden scandal of the system.) The point, of course, is not to find a kinder,
gentler execution method, but to ask what social political interests are served by sanitizing state-sponsored killing.

And politics, finally, is the subject. The roads leading into Gregg and out from it were paved with politics more than law. It's common to say that with Gregg, the Supreme Court reversed the 1972 ban on capital punishment in Furman v Georgia, where the fading Warren Court majority found then-current death penalty laws inherently unequal. Largely forgotten today is the fact
that Furman had only solidified a de facto moratorium on executions that stretched back far longer. Ever since World War II the number of executions in the United States had been falling annually; by the mid-1960s courts identified so many flaws and so much discrimination on the nation's death rows that executions ground to a halt. By the time Troy Gregg's appeal made it to the Supreme Court in 1976, no one had been executed in the United States for a decade.

Gregg resulted from a decade-long campaign by key Republican strategists: Richard Nixon and his White House Counsel William Rehnquist; Ronald Reagan and Edwin Meese in California (it was then-Gov. Reagan, by some accounts, who first stirred the idea of lethal injection in the 1970s, pointing out that horses on his ranch could be humanely put down with a shot). To them,
capital punishment was a way of exploiting public fear of disorder, and particularly of winning the historically death-penalty-friendly South to the GOP column. Over the years since, the key argument they presented for capital punishment as policy--deterrence--has been rubbished by study after study, while every year has brought more evidence of the Gregg system's inherent unfairness and brutality.

Sustaining that system has required some remarkable intellectual
compromises--like the Supreme Court's bizarre 1993 ruling in Herrera v.. Texas, asserting that new evidence of innocence is no bar to an execution. The Supremes finally turned their back on Herrera this year, though Scalia still insists that evidence introduced after trial doesn't belong in courts..

For more than a few Justices, the contradictions of Gregg finally proved too much. Of the original seven-vote Gregg plurality, two Justices--Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell--came to publicly regret their endorsement of capital punishment, and another--John Paul Stevens--seems on a case-by-case basis to be headed the same way. Sandra Day O'Connor spent her last years on
the Court shutting many of the doors Gregg had opened--execution of juveniles and the retarded, for instance--and expressing her grave reservations about capital representation. Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have inherited her unease.

Thirty years on, the legacy of Gregg is a killing machine which puts the United States at odds with most of the world, and which sets the US judiciary at odds with the Constitution's own underlying values. Dissenting in 1976, Justice William Brennan predicted precisely this outcome. The cooly bureaucratic killing mechanisms unleashed by Gregg, he wrote, treat "members
of the human race as nonhumans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded." Brennan understood the continuum between the logic of Gregg and the worst mass crimes of the twentieth century.

It is for this reason, he wrote, that Gregg so undermines the Constitution's explicit, democratic promise that "even the vilest criminal remains a human being possessed of common human dignity." If you write a class of people out of the human race, anything is possible.

Source : The Nation

www.thenation.com/doc/20060717/shapiro

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July 2 was the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Courts Gregg v. Georgia ruling that reinstated the death penalty in the United States. Since that day, 1,076 individuals have been executed in the United States 27 of them here in Louisiana.

Since 1973, more than 115 people have been released from death rows throughout the country because of evidence that they were wrongfully convicted. In 2003 alone, 10 defendants were released from death row.

These are just 2 reasons why the death penalty is wrong. The most fundamental reason, however, is that killing a human being is wrong. It is always wrong regardless of who does the killing.

Capital punishment is a symptom of what has increasingly become a culture of violence in our country, rather than a cure for it. Every human life is sacred.

I ask every reader to think about the first of the inalienable human rights that our ancestors fought for in the American Revolution. Life.

Robin Mayhall, writer, Baton Rouge

(source: Letter to the Editor, The Advocate)

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July 2 marked the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Gregg v. Georgia, reinstating capital punishment in the United States after a 10-year moratorium. In 1966, only 42 % of the American public supported the death penalty. In the 1950s and 1960s, several states abolished capital punishment, as did the Territory of Alaska in 1957. Executions in the United States ceased in 1967, while the courts were considering whether the death penalty could exist under our Constitution.

In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court abolished all existing death penalty statutes in the nation, finding its application "arbitrary and capricious," in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Yet four years later, two days before our nation's bicentennial, the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment with guidelines designed to address the problems condemned in Furman.

The 30-year anniversary of the Gregg decision gives us a chance to reflect on the debate that took place in Supreme Court chambers: Does the death penalty offend evolving standards of decency? Can it be applied in a fair and nondiscriminatory way? The answers now seem clear. Here are the facts.

Arbitrariness: In the 30 years since the Gregg decision, about 2 percent of those convicted of homicide have been sentenced to death. Those chosen for a death sentence are rarely the "worst of the worst." The death penalty is often determined by the quality of defense counsel, lack of resources available to the defense, or local politics.

Conviction of the innocent: Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 127 prisoners have been exonerated and released from death rows across the country.

Racial bias: The proportion of nonwhites among those executed for murder between 1930 and 1967 was 50 %. Today the nonwhite population of those on death row has risen to about 55 %.

International norms: As more countries transition from dictatorships to democracies, capital punishment in those countries has been abolished. Today, virtually all Western democracies are abolitionist jurisdictions. In 2005, 94 percent of all known judicial executions (these imposed by courts under law) were carried out in just four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

Religious norms: According to the American Friends Service Committee, since 1976 almost all of the major denominations in America have found the death penalty to violate their moral standards.

Public opinion: As recently as 1994, Gallup polls found that 80 percent of Americans voiced support for the death penalty. By October 2005, this support had plummeted to 64 percent, the lowest level in 27 years. Given the choice between the death penalty and life imprisonment, 39 % favored long prison terms, and 39 percent favored the death penalty.

Supreme Court decisions: The U.S. Supreme Court has come to recognize "evolving standards of decency" in judging the death penalty. In 2002, the Supreme Court ended the execution of the mentally retarded. In 2005, the court banned the death penalty for juveniles. (Since 1990, the United States has executed more juveniles than any other country.) Both of these decisions were based on "evolving standards of decency."

Deterrence: The Supreme Court in 1976 upheld capital punishment in part because the court believed it deterred crime. Scores of studies since then debunk that belief. Homicide rates have actually increased in death penalty states compared to those in states without a death penalty.

The 30 years after the Gregg decision has established that the Furman court was right: The death penalty has not and can not be applied consistent with those standards that we value and cherish as a free democracy. As Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman concluded in 1994: "I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed."

We in Alaska should be thankful that those who wrote our Alaska
Constitution had the foresight and decency to abolish the death penalty here. Someday, all Americans will be able to celebrate the abolition of the death penalty.

(source: Anchorage Daily News----Rich Curtner is the federal defender for Alaska and serves on the Board of Alaskans Against the Death Penalty; July 4)

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system

This month marks the 30th anniversary of a Supreme Court decision that has had profound consequences in our criminal justice system, perhaps more than any other in the past three decades. Gregg vs. Georgia (1976) reinstated capital punishment four years after the court declared all death penalty statutes unconstitutional. Ever since, the justices have tackled one problem after another to make capital punishment work.

As the court's term drew to a close this year, the justices issued 3
suggestive decisions on the death penalty.

- One opened a new avenue for challenging lethal injection.

- Another allowed lower courts to review a death row inmate's evidence of innocence.

- A 3rd approved mandatory death sentences when juries find aggravating circumstances (for example, committing murder for financial gain) equal to mitigating factors (such as the defendant's emotional state).

The opinions indicate that while the justices recognize current trouble spots in the death penalty system, a majority on the court still believes it's possible to fix whatever problems arise. That view reflects public opinion. Roughly 70 % of Americans favor capital punishment, despite rising concern that some defendants sentenced to die are later found innocent.

When the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional as administered in 1972, the reason was that jurors had so much discretion they applied this punishment arbitrarily, seemingly at random. Soon after, state legislatures developed new procedures to guide decision-making. Death penalty cases were divided into 2 parts. The 1st was the usual trial to establish guilt or innocence. Only if the jury found the defendant guilty did the 2nd phase begin to determine the punishment. Revised death penalty statutes identified aggravating circumstances to supply jurors with criteria for sentencing. Defendants were also permitted to provide
evidence on mitigating factors. Gregg vs. Georgia approved this
legislative scheme of "guided discretion.''

A complex system of death penalty laws has evolved since then. Yet the problems that disturbed Supreme Court justices 30 years ago have not gone away. Despite efforts to reduce arbitrariness, death sentences are not necessarily imposed when the crimes are more severe. Other factors like racial bias and inadequate lawyering have played an important part.

Defendants sentenced to death are frequently poor and less educated, African American or Hispanic and, as we have discovered more and more, even innocent of the crimes charged.

These circumstances have moved several justices to express concern over the years. Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a longtime supporter of capital punishment, conceded that some innocent persons may have been executed. Harry Blackmun, who had voted in the 1970s to keep the death penalty, tried to remedy problems over the next 2 decades. He gave up in 1994, famously saying ''I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of
death.'' Last year, Justice John Paul Stevens described ''serious flaws'' in the system.

My experience working with death penalty cases has led me to reflect on the problems, too. A few years after Gregg vs. Georgia was decided, I served as a law clerk to a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

This court heard cases from Florida, Alabama and Georgia, then and now among the states applying the death penalty most frequently.

The cases I saw highlighted what I believe lies at the root of the
difficulties. Capital crimes are by definition the most horrifying. They include torture-murders and children as victims; something that stands out from other killings. It is natural for people to react emotionally. Yet jurors are told to presume the accused innocent until proven guilty. We expect police and prosecutors to maintain their professionalism. Judges must conduct trials fairly.

We ask a lot of everyone involved, perhaps too much. The legal process is part art and part science. We can never eliminate the role of human psychology. Emotions matter. Add to that problems that may lead conscientious jurors to convict the wrong person: victims make mistaken identifications, witnesses lie, police and prosecutors may falsify evidence.

The result? An imperfect system of criminal justice in which problems multiply in capital punishment cases. Undoubtedly there are trials where the death penalty appears to work, with skilled defense counsel, an impartial jury and due process. Yet apparent success in some cases highlights the systemic breakdown that has occurred. A fundamental idea of American law is that all defendants should receive fair trials all of the time. The persistent failure to come close to that in death penalty cases
undermines the integrity of the legal system.

After 3 decades of operating under the regime established in Gregg vs. Georgia, the issue is no longer what the court can do to make capital punishment work. The real issue is why capital punishment won't work, whatever the court does.

(source : Centre Daily - Stuart Streichler is the author of Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism)