St.Louis Post-Dispatch

Public outcry can stem executions, says opponent of death penalty

Rallying community support for black and other minority murder defendants is one way to keep them from being executed, says the director of a national group that opposes the death penalty.

 Steven W. Hawkins, director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, was among the speakers Friday at a seminar for defense lawyers at the Washington University School of Law. Hawkins urged lawyers to be vigorous and creative in showing racial injustice in death penalty cases.

 One of those ways, Hawkins said, is to seek help from ministers and other community activists who can rally public support for members of minority racial groups who are charged with capital murder. He said that kind of pressure can help in dealing with prosecutors and judges.

 "Remember that courts are political institutions," Hawkins said. "Community pressure is critical to a race-based claim. Really, you want to put the system on trial."

 He said other tactics would be to study the racial makeups of all murders and all murder defendants within a certain city or county, or to study the racial makeups of the crimes that certain prosecutors turn into death penalty cases.

 Hawkins, 39, of Washington, handled death penalty cases in his former job as an associate counsel for the NAACP. The conference Friday was co-sponsored by two defense attorney organizations, and Hawkins was there on behalf of his organization's local affiliate.

 Hawkins cited studies of death row cases showing that murderers of whites are 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than are killers of blacks and other minorities. He said blacks are about 20 times more likely to be sentenced to death if they murdered whites than if they murdered other blacks.

 Defenders of capital punishment say the murderers of whites are more likely to get death because the cases are more likely to involve attacks upon people, such as robbery victims, who had never known their killers.

 Arguing against that, Hawkins said the statistical difference is too wide to deny a racial basis for the decisions of prosecutors. The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to accept that argument, but Hawkins said he thought the "time may be ripe" for another look by the court.

 "Remember, we're talking 4.3 times more," Hawkins said. "The whole argument against smoking is based upon knowing that the correlation between lung cancer and smoking is but 2.1 times higher than for nonsmokers."