Does the death penalty deter?

Press, 15 July 1985, Page 12

Does the death penalty deter?

lAN BALL, in New York, compares the experiences of America’s abolitionist States with those of neighbours retaining capital punishment. Reprinted from the “Daily Telegraph,” London

With more than 1460 men and women awaiting their fate in Death Rows across America — and one or two each week actually being led to that final, grim walk — it is hardly surprising that executions nowadays no longer automatically rate a minute or two on the. evening network news or a front-page headline. To guarantee that the media will record one’s departure from Death Row, a condemned prisoner these days must go out with a touch of drama. An outrageous, or perhaps poignant, last statement, or some technical hitch: the 2500volt surge that fails to do the job within the usual length of time; the executioner with lethal needle who has trouble finding a suitable vein.

Too quietly for some tastes. “Taking the debate about capital punishment off the front pages has a negative effect,” says Mr Craig Barnard, a legal-aid lawyer in, of all places, Palm Beach county, Florida. He represents 14 Death Row prisoners. In common with many other opponents of capital punishment, he is disturbed by “the lack of any rational debate over the death penalty and the ease by which we are able to view the people on Death Row as objects rather than people.” To some experts, the absence of publicity undermines the argument that execution is a deterrent to murder. If no example is to be made of the condemned individual, what lesson is to be drawn by other would-be killers? (Remember those splendid, only partly apocryphal, stories of the lights flickering and dimming in homes around New York’s Sing Sing prison when “Old Sparky,” the world’s oldest and most-used electric chair, was first put into service in the 1890 s? There was an example!) Curiously, the advocates and opponents of capital punishment find common ground on this one issue — they see it as a positive thing when newspapers and television consider executions newsworthy events. Just how blase the Fourth Estate has grown about executions was well demonstrated in Florida earlier this year. In 1979, prison officials had to hold a lottery among reporters who wanted to be one of 12 execution witnesses. Now, after putting more prisoners to death than any other State, Florida has trouble getting any takers from the media when it sets out to recruit its grisly quorum. Is capital punishment then, in today’s society, the deterrent its proponents have claimed over the years? Does that deterrence rely on black headlines and a lurid bit of television film every once in a while?

In an execution in Texas in January, the medical orderly searched a killer-junkie’s limbs for 40 minutes before he could find the right spot to take the sodium thiopental and potassium chloride. “The guy’s veins are shot,” explained a prison spokesman with some testiness.

In these angry times in America, a Bernard Goetz is assured an acre or two of newsprint, documentary treatment on television, book contracts and may be a Hollywood film offer. The multiple murderer in Alabama might rate no more than a modest obituary in his local paper. The country’s decade-long moratorium on capital punishment ended barely eight years ago when Gary Gilmore went before a firing squad in Utah. But already the death penalty is solidly re-estab-lished as an instrument of justice: of the 38 States that have the death penalty, 33 have candidates for execution in Death Row cells at the moment.

Florida has more than 220, Texas some 180 and California 166. The numbers are climbing in almost every State. Society’s latest interpretation of the eye-for-an-eye principle has created a growth industry that quietly gets on with the job.

As has probably always been the case, the argument over deterrence is booby-trapped with ambiguities. The American experience since the United States Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 has provided little, if any, clear-cut new information. A century and a half ago, the debate was over whether the executions should continue to be held in public. The hard-liners then argued that removing them from public view would make them less effective. The liberals of the day asserted that public hangings merely stimulated violent instincts. Nowadays, the experts tend to address themselves to various psychological fine points rather than searching for trends and answers in the statistics. There have been at least six major sociological studies that reached the conclusion there was no solid evidence that the death penalty has any effect on the murder rate in a particular jurisdiction.

The most powerful findings of all are probably those offered by the experience of paired neighbouring States (Michigan-Indiana, Rhode Island-Massachusetts, South Dakota-North Dakota) one of which abandoned capital punishment for a time while the other went ahead with executions. The murder rates over these periods remained virtually identical on either side of the State lines. Certainly, the restoration of capital punishment in 38 States has not led to an improvement in their murder-rate statistics in comparison with the rates in the 12 States without the death penalty. What is clear, however, is that most Americans have a gut feeling that electric chairs and gas chambers and gallows do indeed have some deterrence. The jury is still out when it comes to trendy, “humane” lethal-anaesthesia injections. “What you have here is a false but understandable inference from common life,” says Mr Henry Schwarzschild, director of the capital punishment project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “People conclude that because they are deterred by the threat of punishment, murderers will also be deterred.”

But murderers are not deterred because “they either expect they will get away with the crime, or they’re going to act irrespective of the consequences.” In other words — and this is something on which we hardly need an expert’s reassurance — the mental attitude of the typical killer cannot usefully be likened to that of the average law-abiding citizen. In spite of such arguments, the abolitionists seem to be losing ground everywhere. Public senti-

ment to get tough with violent criminals, to kill the killers, has shown particularly robust growth in the past decade. The pendulum may swing back a generation hence, of course, but for the time being capital punishment seems to enjoy much the same depth of support among Americans as it did in Victorian England. The last major American public opinion poll on the issue produced an astonishing majority in favour of the death penalty — 84 per cent.