Mike Farrell, president of Death Penalty Focus; in the San Francisco Chronicle

CALIFORNIA/USA: PENALTY PHASE America, Incarcerated -- or Executed; Death penalty thrives in climate of fear

Though still a bit skittish, Americans seem to be dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks better than their politicians. Citizens are finding ways to move on, intent on preserving a strong democratic society that remains committed to justice.

Politicians, on the other hand, still want to feast on fear and anger, notably by expanding the nation's most shameful instrument: the death penalty. Latest to join the ghoulish list are California's Republican Assembly members. Last week, they introduced an unnecessary, hopelessly redundant and attention-seeking measure making terrorism a crime punishable by death.

Just days after September's awful attacks, the New York legislature expanded that state's capital offenses to include murder committed in furtherance of terrorist activity. Politicians in Wisconsin one-upped them by trying to revive capital punishment, abolished there in 1853. Then, Virginia, South Carolina, Indiana and Illinois climbed aboard, howling for death.

 Now California's terrormongers have joined the parade, demonstrating their abhorrence of violence by urging more killing. Attorney General Bill Lockyer, refusing to play, says terrorist activities are already covered under state laws, and most also fall under the federal umbrella.

 Don't these guys know that California -- and 37 other states plus the federal government - already have death penalty statutes covering the crimes committed on Sept. 11? What good did they do? Indeed, what impact could the death penalty have in dissuading suicidal terrorists?

 Rather than stopping zealous bombers, broadening death penalty laws will only ensnare more people in a broken system staggering toward collapse. Illinois Gov. George Ryan's 2-year-old moratorium on executions exposed the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil cover behind which death-promoters hide. Ryan, a Republican, earlier this year vetoed an expansion of the death penalty, saying "it would be difficult to imagine a scenario under which a terrorist act resulting in death would not already qualify for capital punishment under our current statute."

 Unlike Gov. Gray Davis, who is campaigning as Dr. Death, Ryan found the courage to indict the capital punishment system as "fraught with error" and appointed a bipartisan commission to find ways to fix it or end it.

 Perhaps our Assembly Republicans missed Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's statement last July. She noted the more than 90 death row exonerations and said that "serious questions are being raised about whether the death penalty is being fairly administered in this country . . . If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed."

 Public support for the death penalty has fallen 20 points in a decade because of revelations of withheld evidence, mistaken eyewitness identification, questionable forensic practices, prosecutorial misconduct and simple error. Eager to stem that erosion, California Republican Assembly members hope that exploiting the war on terror by expanding the death penalty will win them votes -- and thus more seats.

 Will the terror gambit succeed?

 A Field Poll last year showed 73 % of Californians in favor of a moratorium on the death penalty.

 Besides fearing that innocent people may be executed, the public is concerned about overwhelming evidence of the system's unfairness. Race, ethnic origin and economic status largely determine who receives a death sentence and who does not.

 But none of this bothers the Assembly Republicans - nor, apparently, our governor -- who seem to be unaware of a recent Justice Department study showing that 80 % of federal defendants sentenced to death are people of color.

 Waving the banner of terrorism may feel good, but does it excuse ignorance of the inequities of the system they're trying to prop up?

 Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently said, "I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial. People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty."

 A bitter example of Ginsburg's concern, Stephen Wayne Anderson, was killed by California last month -- after Gov. Davis refused to grant clemency - despite a hapless defense by an attorney whom 6 justices from the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals characterized as "deceptive, untrustworthy and disloyal to his client."

 In difficult times, people want leadership. So politicians scuttle around trying to appear like leaders. To trot out the death penalty canard because they can't come up with something meaningful is an embarrassment. A moratorium on political ambition, as well as on new executions, would seem to be in order. 

USA:American Gulag: Petty criminals doing hard time

The United States has achieved the dubious honor of boasting the largest prison and jail population on Earth. It reached this zenith by surpassing cash-strapped Russia -- long its only rival as a society of mass imprisonment -- after Russia released thousands of inmates so as to save money. A few years earlier, as America rushed to lock up ever more of its population for ever-pettier offenses, the absolute size of its incarcerated population surpassed that of China -- despite China's population being more than 4 times that of America. According to research by the British Home Office, America now incarcerates over 1/5 of the world's prisoners. There is something bitterly ironic in this. America really is a land of liberty, a place where lives, often scarred by injustice elsewhere, can be remade. How tragic that over the past 20 years, the country's political leaders have so often decided to deal with many of the most noxious side-effects of poverty -- from chronic drug use and the establishment of street drug markets, to hustling, gang membership and spraying graffiti on public buildings -- through a vast over-reliance on incarceration. How doubly tragic that this has occurred in tandem with a political assault on the Great Society anti-poverty programs put in place during the 1960s; that the investments in infrastructure, public education, public health care and job training which might curtail crime more effectively are, instead, being replaced by massive public expenditures on building new prisons. The numbers buttressing this sprawling prison system are extraordinary. Approximately 2 million Americans are now serving either prison or jail time, over 1 million of them for non-violent offenses (a preponderance of these either for drug use or low-level drug sales). Per hundred thousand residents, the United States has an incarceration rate over 5 times that of England, 6 times that of Canada and 7 times that of Germany. Somewhere around 10 percent of African American men in their 20s live behind bars. In some states, where a single felony conviction is enough to bar the offender from ever being able to vote again, over one quarter of African American males are disenfranchised. Since 1980, a virtual "prison industrial complex" has arisen, with phenomenal rates of new-prison construction abetted by lucrative construction and prison- guard union lobbies. Several states, including California, spend more on prisons than they do on higher education. Despite dramatically falling crime rates over the last 10 years (which most criminologists attribute more to demography -- there have simply been fewer young men of late), prison populations have continued to soar. As the number of truly heinous crimes has fallen, increasingly it is small-time hoodlums, drug users, and mentally ill people who have been drawing long spells behind bars. America today has five times as many prisoners as it did in 1980. One of the most dismaying developments is the spread of so-called "3 strikes" laws. California's version, passed by citizen referendum in 1993 and ratcheted into place by state legislators in 1994, provides for life imprisonment of a criminal with 2 previous serious convictions who is found guilty of a 3rd felony. By the end of last year, there were about 7,000 people serving life sentences in California under this law. Many thousands of them are serving life for small-time "3rd strikes": minor drug crimes, car theft, petty fraud and burglary. One such man is 58-year-old heroin addict Billy Ochoa, who is serving 326 years in a supermax (super maximum security) prison for $2,100 of welfare fraud. Because he had been convicted of several burglaries over the previous decades, when Ochoa was caught making fraudulent applications for food stamps and emergency housing vouchers in Los Angeles, he was tried under the 3 strikes law and given sentences on 13 separate counts to be served in one of the toughest, most secure prisons in America. Ochoa's sentence, apart from its extravagant cruelty, may ultimately cost taxpayers as much as a million dollars. In many high security American prisons, inmates are routinely kept in virtual isolation, fed in their cells, allowed out for only half an hour of exercise a day, sometimes denied a TV, a radio, or even decorations for their concrete walls conditions which have been documented to drive many of them into states of serious psychosis. How can things have come to this America? Sasha Abramsky is the author of "Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built A Prison Nation," published by St. Martins Press. This article was written for Project Syndicate, based in Prague; appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle)