Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 20, 1993 TAG: 9401140003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``Pro-choice'' advocates appear to regard capital punishment as only marginal to their perpetual yammer about ``women's bodies'' and the sanctity of ``privacy.''
``Pro-life'' advocates appear to hope the whole issue of capital punishment will go away as they yammer endlessly about ``the rights of the unborn'' and the ``sanctity of human life.''
What neither side acknowledges is that the death penalty, and its continuation and continuing expansion in the United States, is a matter of human life too, or that if you claim sanctity for a fetus you are obliged, in simple decency, to claim it for criminals as well.
The matter of capital punishment is, until the death penalty is abolished everywhere, of irreversible importance; but it has an added importance this summer because (a) President Bill Clinton's crime bill proposes to broaden its applicability to various federal crimes, and (b) a number of death sentences have either been reversed or commuted, and a number of others cry out for reversal or commutation, because of compelling evidence that the condemned were innocent of the crimes for which they were condemned.
Every president in modern times has had a ``crime bill,'' of course, and few amount, in practical effect, to a hill of beans. Clinton's is no different as long as it ignores handgun and automatic-weapons control and fails to take serious federal steps against drug importation and sales. But it is a showboat effort in the tradition of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, both of whom posed, with congressional help, as ``tough on crime'' while crime soared despite their bragging.
Expansion of capital punishment into new areas of wrongdoing may still encourage the gullible to believe that use of the death penalty is a sign of ``toughness,'' which, of course, is what every ambitious politician wants to seem. The fact that the overwhelming majority of serious crimes in America infringe state laws, which federal crime laws, no matter how pretentious, cannot reach, goes unrecognized.
More immediate to the issue of capital punishment is the reversal of four death sentences in June and July, all on the ground that serious doubt existed about the guilt of the defendants. Another, like the others in Texas, was stayed at the last moment on similar grounds.
The point to be made, in each case and unquestionably in many more, is that each defendant was nearly put to death despite the possibility - or even the likelihood - that he was innocent.
That raises, in turn, the question of human fallibility, which is central to the decision to fry, gas, hang or chemically kill criminals or apparent criminals. Though no other criminal penalty is inflexible or irreversible, the death penalty is. Experts estimate that, since 1900, the states, mostly Southern, have legally executed several hundred innocent men and women. Can any society that calls itself ``civilized'' go on gambling like that with its citizens' lives?
Capital punishment accomplishes nothing, in fact, beyond the extinction of a particular life. No evidence shows that it ``deters'' crime. It is rarely carried out evenhandedly, and geographically it has become a specialty only of Texas, Florida and a few other Southern states. And it claims an infallibility of judgment that few humans would otherwise boast.
Most of all, though, capital punishment flagrantly and defiantly contradicts every assertion of this supposedly ``Christian'' nation that it treasures human life above all things. That is a contradiction that the adversaries in the controversy over abortion have a duty to face.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB