Toward death penalty reform

E ven as Congress was advancing long-delayed U.S.death penalty reforms last week, the Supreme Court was moving in the opposite direction, lending ta-cit approvai to modern-day barbar-ism. The justices declined to review a lower court ruling allowing a de-ranged prisoner to be forcibly medic-ated to make him sane enough to be executed.

Americans' enthusiasm for the death penalty has been muted in re-cent years as they learn more about how it is actually applied. And those stories continue to surface, each more distressing than the next. A re-cent article in The New York Times pointed to a growing debate among legai and medicai experts about the supposedly humane use of lethal in-jections to kill condemned prison-, ers, noting that Tennessee recently outlawed use of one of the chemicals for pet euthanasia.

The developments in Congress re-flect the positive side of ali these dis-closures - a desire even among sup-porters of the death penalty to eliminate some of the most out-rageous aspects of how it is applied. With crucial help from the House Ju-diciary Committee chairman, F. James Sensenbrenner jr., and Repre-sentatives Ray LaHood and Bill De-lahunt, a coalition of congressional Republicans and Democrats has come up with a compromise on com-bating wrongful convictions in death penalty cases, a measure that has languished year after year.

The new legislation combines President George W. Bush's initiative to reduce the backlog of biological evidence awaiting testing with a pale version of Senator Patrick Leahy's Innocence Protection Act. This hy-brid has cleared an important hurdle, passing the House Judiciary Committee by a 28-to-1 vote. A vote by the full House is expected shortly.

No one should be deluded into thinking the measure is a cure-all, however. Plenty of factors that con-tribute to the risk of executing the in-nocent were left unaddressed, like coerced confessions and the faulty recollection of eyewitnesses. Nor would the bill stop states from for-cibly medicating deranged prisoners to get around the Eighth Amendment ban on executing the mentally in-competent - the serious constitu-tional issue sidestepped by the justices.

The truth is that there is no cure-ali for the ethical, moral and practical problems capitai punishment raises - that is, short of a Supreme Court ruling finally abolishing the inher-ently cruel and unusual "machinery of death," as Justice Harry Blackmun termed it. It could be a long wait. In the meantime, the consensus reform bill now chugging through Congress is surely preferable to the alternative, which is for Congress to do nothing.