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Why
the Death Penalty Should Be Killed
by
George E. Curry - NNPA Columnist Lost amid all the hoopla
surrounding the upcoming execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy
McVeigh is that when it comes to determining who gets the death
penalty in this country, race matters. And it matters a lot. Of
the 19 federal prisoners who will be left on death row after
McVeigh is finally executed, 14 of them are African-American and
three are Hispanic, according to the Death Penalty Information
Center in Washington, D.C.The numbers are even more shocking when
one considers that African-Americans sent to federal prisons for
all crimes has generally been in the 21 percent to 27 percent
range throughout the 1980s, according to the Justice Department's
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Whites accounted for about 75
percent of all new prisoners over this same period.Yet, Blacks are
far more likely to be sentenced to death."You've got a death
row that is almost all minority," Elisabeth Semel, director
of the American Bar Association's Death Penalty Representation
Project, tells the Associated Press. "What are the reasons
for that? The system is broken, and the only way to ensure that it
gets fixed up is to stop it."And that's exactly what some
states, including Illinois, have done following highly-publicized
disclosures that innocent people have been wrongly sentenced to
death.According to the Campaign to End The Death Penalty, more
than 82 people have been released from prison since 1976 after
having been sentenced to death. The book, "In Spite of
Innocence," documented 416 cases where innocent persons were
given death sentences, 23 of whom were actually executed.Many of
those sentenced to die were prosecuted by people who don't look
like them.According to a study by Professor Jeffrey Pokorak at St.
Mary's University Law School in Texas, 97.5 percent of the chief
prosecutors around the country using the death penalty are White,
most of them men. Only 1 percent are African-American.An
African-American who kills a White person is far more likely to
receive the death penalty than were they to kill a member of their
own race. For example, a University of Louisville study shows that
in 1996, every inmate on death row in Kentucky had been placed
there for murdering a White person. No one has been sentenced to
death for killing an African-American, even though more than 1,000
Blacks have been murdered in Kentucky since the death penalty was
reinstated. The last federal prisoner to be executed before was
Victor Feguer, who was hanged in 1963, for murdering a physician
in Iowa. Overall, there were 34 federal executions from 1927 to
1963. In one of the most celebrated cases, Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg were executed in 1953 after being convicted of giving
American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.The overwhelming
number of death sentences are imposed by states. In 1972, the
Supreme Court issued a ruling in Furman v. Georgia that
essentially halted executions. The court said that because juries
in Georgia had complete discretion in imposing the death penalty,
the result could lead to arbitrary sentencing. That single ruling
overturned the death penalty statues of 40 states, sparing the
lives of 629 inmates.Within five months, Florida became the first
of 35 states to rewrite their death penalty statues to comply with
the Supreme Court ruling in Furman. In 1988, the federal death
penalty was revived in the wake of the crack cocaine explosion.
African-Americans became even more over represented on death row
when Congress, seeking to curb the drug problem, expanded the
death penalty in 1994 to include an additional 60 offenses,
including operating a large drug enterprise.A House Congressional
subcommittee report titled, "Racial Disparities in Federal
Death Prosecutions 1988-1994," provides a stunning indictment
of the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act."Three quarters of those
convicted of participating in a drug enterprise under the general
provisions of [the drug law] have been white and only about 24
percent of the defendants have been black," the report notes.
"However, of those chosen for death penalty prosecutions
under this section, just the opposite is true: 78 percent of the
defendants have been black and only 11 percent of the defendants
have been white."The strongest argument advanced by capital
punishment proponents is that it is a deterrent to crime. However,
a survey by The New York Times shows that states without the death
penalty have lower homicide rates than states with the death
penalty.According to the Times, 10 of the 12 states without the
death penalty have homicide rates below the national average. By
contrast, half of the states with the death penalty have homicide
rates higher than the national average. Death penalty supporters
also argue that capital punishment is needed to discourage the
killing of police officers.However, FBI statistics show that cop
killings are actually higher in areas that invoke the death
penalty. The South, for example, accounts for 80 percent of all
executions (90 percent in 2000). Yet, the region led the nation in
the number of law enforcement officials feloniously killed between
1989-98, with 125 deaths. The northeast, with the fewest number of
executions, had less than 1 percent of the law enforcement
officers killed.Even though police officers generally support the
death penalty, it is not high on their list of anti-crime tools.
In survey after survey, they rank swift and certain punishment as
the most effective deterrent to crime, followed by the need to
reduce drug abuse, a better economy with more jobs, simplifying
court rules, expanding the number of police officers and reducing
the number of guns placing more on the street. Contrary to popular
belief, it's cheaper to keep a prisoner behind bars for life than
executing him or her. Former Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox
says it cost three times as much - more than $2 million per inmate
- to carry out the death penalty than to imprison an inmate for 40
years."I think that the only purpose for the death penalty,
as I see it, is vengeance - pure and simply," says Janet
Reno, attorney general under the Clinton Administration. "But
I think vengeance is a very personal feeling and I don't think it
is something that civilized government should engage in."George
E. Curry is former editor-in-chief of Emerge: Black America's
Newsmagazine. He can be reached through his Web site,
www.georgecurry.com
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