United States set for 10 years of judicial killing

Press, 19 July 1983, Page 21

United States set for 10 years of judicial killing

Tired of mugging and murder, the American public is in vengeful mood. So a decision this month by the United States Supreme Court which will ease the passage of convicted killers from death row to gallows and gas chambers fits perfecty with the prevailing desire for harsher sentences and swifter retribution.

However, opponents of capital punishment are appalled at the prospect of perhaps 10. further executions this year and an average of one a week throughout 1984. The Supreme Court decision in the case of Thomas Barefoot, a Texan who murdered a policeman five years ago, clears the way for lower courts to dispose of capital cases without the cat-and-mouse game by which most condemned people can keep the executioner at bay for up to 10 years.

It also sent judges a clear message that courts ought to dispatch killers more swiftly, lest the law falls into disrepute. The Barefoot case gives some idea of how fast matters may move in the future once a condemned person has exhausted the first tier of appeals. His lawyers were alerted on January 17 that the appeal would be heard on the 19th: on the 20th a decision was handed down, and an execution date set for the 25th. This, said the Supreme Court —v,the ultimate fcbiter of judicial process - was

“tolerable.” Barefoot, who was granted a stay of execution while the Supreme Court ruled, may now be executed by lethal injection within weeks — a method Ronald Reagan once compared to calling in the vet to “put to sleep” an injured horse. Another unsavory criminal, Jimmy Lee Gray, who killed his girl-friend 15 years ago and then sexually assaulted and murdered a three year old while on parole, and who was granted a last-minute stay 10 days ago, will probably go to the Mississippi gas chamber at about the same time.

The American capital punishment system is complex and patchy. Its opponente claim that eventual execution is merely a lottery, with the odds shortened dramatically against poor and blacks who commit their crimes in the Deep South, where the majority of America’s 1200 death-row inmates await their fate.

Thirty-seven of the 50 states apply the death penalty, and a condemned person can pursue his case through both the criminal and civil courts, arguing in the latter that his consffiutional rights have

been somewhere violated in the long process between arrest and sentence. The Barefoot decision accelerates the handling of these constitutional considerations.

Federal appeals courts will now be able to consider the merits of a case at what amounts to a summary hearing, and at the same time deny a stay of execution pending further appeals up the judicial ladder. Someone may be legally executed while his theoretical appeal rights have not been exhausted — which happened last December in Texas when fresh appeal papers arrived for a condemned man the morning after his execution.

“We had a live case, but a dead plaintiff,” his lawyer said. The origins of such bizarre proceedings date back to the nationwide suspension of capital punishment in 1967. Five years later the Supreme Court — which has a penchant for having matters both ways — ruled that all existing death penalty laws were unconstitutional, but that the penalty itself was not. A This sent many/states rushing

away to rewrite their laws, and executions resumed in. 1977 with the shooting in Utah of Gary Gilmore, the flamboyant hero of a subsequent Normal Mailer book, who waived his right to appeal. Since then six more people have been executed by such diverse methods as gassing, electrocution, and lethal injection — it took three bursts of electricity to kill the last man in April — and large numbers are reaching the end of the now speeded-up appeals procedure. Since more than five new death sentences are passed every week, the numbers awaiting execution will swell dramatically, even if the courts buckle down to the task of killing one inmate a week. The most salient statistic, however, is that there are about 400 murders a week in the United States, 40 of which might be classified as “criminal” rather than “domestic,” so that even if there was an execution every working day, by no means all the "heinous” killers would die, and the punishment would remain arbitrary and controversial.

None of these imperfections weighs very heavily with the American people, wi»' are

The British Parliament has disregarded the wishes of the majority of British people by overwhelmingly turning back those who fought to restore capital punishment in the country. The United States, on the other hand, is taking the opposite course, as ROBERT CHESSHYRE reports from Washington.

overwhelmingly in favour of the death penalty — a dramatic reversal from 20 years ago — and who have long since ceased arguing principally on the dubious basis of deterrence. Now, says Henry Schwarzschild, director of the capital punishment project of the American Civil Liberties Union, the pre-eminent motive is retribution. “A son of a bitch like Barefoot deserves to die,” most people would say. Death penalty opponents, recognising that a watershed was passed in the Barefoot decision, expect 10 years of regular executions — fighting each case as best they can — before either the public sickens at the reality of so much judicial killing, or the composition of the Supreme Court alters sufficiently for the argument to prevail that itis “cruel and unusual” — and therefore unconstitutional — to execute about one per cent of murderers.

If as. a practical matter the American people really want to do something about homicide, suggest Schwarzschild and others, they might address their energies to the control of handguns. It is the easy access to deadly weapons, rather than the uneven punishment handed out to convicted killers, that makes the United States such a dangerous place in which to live. Copyright — London Observer Service. ¥