Stopping Executions Is the Right Step to Take

By William Perkins and David Kaczynski

William Perkins (D-Harlem) is deputy majority leader of the City Council and main sponsor of the moratorium resolution. David Kaczynski is executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty

 July 12, 2002

 The passage recently of a death penalty moratorium resolution by the City Council reflects a growing awareness of serious problems with the death penalty. It comes hard on the heels of two landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions. In Atkins vs. Virginia, the high court banned execution of the mentally retarded, and in Ring vs. Arizona it overturned up to 168 death sentences in states where juries have been excluded from capital sentencing decisions. This week, delegates representing 125,000 members and 50,000 retirees of District Council 37, the city's largest public employee union, voted overwhelmingly to endorse the City Council's moratorium resolution.

 In considering the appeal of Darrel K. Harris, a former city correction officer who was the first person sentenced to death under New York's 1995 death penalty law, the state Court of Appeals overturned Harris' death sentence on narrow constitutional grounds while leaving unanswered a number of broader challenges to the constitutionality of the capital punishment statute.

 As courts throughout the land tinker with the legalities of capital punishment, more and more people are scratching their heads, wondering just where justice lies. Where is justice for the 44 mentally retarded defendants who were executed before the Supreme Court ruled their executions unconstitutional? Where is due process for those executed without a jury's consent prior to the court's decision in Ring? As yet, no coherent, reasonable, fair standards have been developed to determine who should live and who should die.

 Until recently, judicial responses to glaring flaws in the capital justice system have attempted to rationalize the apparent lack of justice. Courts have seemed more interested in protecting the justice system than in ensuring that there is justice within the system. The U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged that there are documented patterns of racial bias in the administration of capital punishment, but held that such patterns are of no concern to the judiciary. It passed the responsibility for correcting such injustices to the legislative branch, which is supposed to reflect more closely the will of the people.

 Reasonable people might disagree on the ultimate morality of executions, but no reasonable person can have confidence in the capital justice system as it is now applied. The possibility certainly exists that an innocent person could be executed in New York. In a number of cases, city residents have been convicted of murder, only to be exonerated and released from prison years later. Geographic and racial inequities are readily apparent in our death-penalty system. If an airplane worked as poorly as our capital justice system, no one would fly on it and no one would seriously suggest keeping it in flight.

 According to two separate studies by Equal Justice USA and the Capital Punishment Research Initiative at SUNY/Albany, New York's death penalty statute lacks many of the protections recently recommended in the Ryan Commission report, the result of two years of studying capital punishment in Illinois at the behest of Republican Gov. George Ryan. In other words, there are a number of loopholes in New York law that could result in the execution of an innocent person.

 Beyond this baseline concern with the law's accuracy looms the whole issue of its fairness. When a sentence of life or death depends on the defendant's social class, his race, his economic resources, his county of residence, the whim of the prosecutor, political pressures or other factors unrelated to the severity of the crime or the defendant's character, then what we have is not justice but a hollow legal process that threatens the elemental fairness on which justice depends.

 The myth that the death penalty deters crime has been refuted in study after study. A moratorium on executions would cause no one to be released from prison - unless, of course, someone on death row were shown to be innocent. Studies have consistently found that the death penalty is far more costly than a system that imprisons for life. In a time of fiscal constraint, we must commit ourselves to a responsible investment of limited resources. The tab for New York's death penalty has reached at least $100 million, with no demonstrable social benefit. New Yorkers are beginning to ask, "What are we paying for, and how much longer must we keep paying?"

 To be sure, the City Council's passage of Resolution 12A is non-binding - a symbolic gesture. But symbolism is a meaningful form of expression. America's first city has a long tradition of involvement in important social issues. As people increasingly express concern about the many problems that plague the death penalty, the City Council's call for a moratorium on executions is both timely and necessary. Let us hope that the governor and the State Legislature will take it to heart and do the right thing.

Copyright � 2002, Newsday