New Haven Register

USA: Death penalty unfair, Dukakis says

U.S. society has made "some progress" since the 1927 executions of Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, but the death penalty remains an inherently unfair form of punishment, former presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis said Wednesday at Southern Connecticut State University.

 "I think we've made some progress because the America where I grew up, the Boston it was racist, it was anti-Semitic, it was to some extent anti-Italian," said Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and from 1983 to 1991.

 When Dukakis, a child of Greek and Greek-Turkish immigrants, arrived at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1951, "barber shops wouldn't cut the hair of a black kid," he said.

 In 1977, Dukakis, who opposes capital punishment, made history when he issued a proclamation on the 50th anniversary of the executions clearing the names of Sacco and Vanzetti, in a 1927 murder.

 He was the keynote speaker Wednesday at an SCSU forum on the death penalty to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the executions. Dukakis spoke between 2 panel discussions on "Racial and Ethnic Profiling in the Criminal Justice System" and on "The Question of Innocence."

 One problem with capital punishment is that "rich folks never go to the (electric) chair and that includes O.J. Simpson," Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic nominee for president, told several dozen people in an art gallery in Southern's Buley Library.

 "And, of course, the thing that the Sacco and Vanzetti cases tell us is, once it is implemented, it is irreversible," he said.

 Dukakis said he signed the proclamation to do what he could for Sacco and Vanzetti's relatives and for other Italian Americans who were hurt by the verdicts in their cases.

 "This was just a case that plunged a dagger into the heart of the Italian American community" at a time when it already was subject to prejudice, he said.

 Dukakis said "there is no question that the fact that I am of Greek descent had a lot to do with why I did what I did." While he couldn't remember being exposed to prejudice himself, he said he always was sensitive to it.

 The panel that followed Dukakis featured Stephen Hawkins, executive director of Abolish the Death Penalty; Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor to The Nation; Catholic New Service columnist Antoinette Bosco, who opposes capital punishment despite the murder of her son and daughter-in-law; Waterbury State's Attorney John Connelly, and SCSU professor Kathleen Skoczen, founder of Southern's Amnesty International chapter.

 Shapiro and Hawkins argued that, as Shapiro put it, "it's unethical to execute people when there is such a high probability of someone innocent being executed." Connelly, meanwhile, argued that none of the anti-death penalty groups "have come forward and been able to show that an innocent person had been executed."

 Bosco, who opposed capital punishment before her son's death, said that while she wanted the killer punished, "it certainly didn't take long before I decided I did not what him killed."

 Skoczen said the death penalty "isn't about guilt or innocence" but instead "is symbolic It is a form of human sacrifice" that "is about making the middle and upper classes feel as if something is being done," she said.