Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 21, 1994 TAG: 9404210229
SECTION: NATIONAL/INT PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The bill's language would allow inmates on death row to use statistics on racial disparity to challenge their sentences. In view of the fact that implementation of capital punishment laws is largely the province of state legislatures and state courts, Congress' authority to do this is uncertain.
The bill, as it stands, would apply to current death row inmates, but House Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, promised to drop the retroactive provision in the upcoming conference session with the Senate.
Support from House Democratic leaders helped overcome a partisan dispute over capital punishment that threatened ``racial justice'' provisions of a $27 billion crime bill. House Speaker Thomas Foley, D-Wash., cast a rare floor vote and Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., gave an impassioned speech in opposition to a Republican substitute, which failed 217-212.
Race has played a prominent role in capital punishment cases in the United States over the decades and contributed to the Supreme Court's decision in 1972 to invalidate existing death penalty statutes. More than two-thirds of the states have since restored the death penalty under laws designed to eliminate unfairness in sentencing.
But death penalty critics have pointed to continuing racial disparities in executions and death sentences. Black Americans make up about 40 percent of the 232 inmates put to death since 1977 and of the 2,800 held on death row, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Studies have found the death penalty to be much more common when the victims are white. About 84 percent of the victims killed by the inmates executed since 1977 have been white, according to the fund's statistics.
The Senate did not address the controversial issue in a $22 billion crime bill passed in November. The Senate's inaction puts that section of the House bill in jeopardy when a conference meets to reconcile differences between the two versions of anti-crime legislation.
The Senate rejected language on racial disparity in death sentencing similar to the House bill's as recently as 1991. The House language, which the Congressional Black Caucus pushed, would modify a Supreme Court decision handed down almost seven years ago that said statistical evidence of racial disparity was not enough to challenge death penalty laws as unconstitutional. The court split 5-4 in the McCleskey vs. Kemp ruling.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who was prompted by that decision to first propose racial justice safeguards in 1988, said that the House vote ``sends a signal that there's some understanding of the pervasiveness of racism in the [criminal justice] system.''
Conyers, a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, predicted that death penalty statistics would be most useful to minority defendants in a half-dozen states in the South and West, including Texas, Mississippi and Georgia.
Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., proposed a substitute simply banning the use of statistics to prove racial bias in death sentencing because he said the House bill would ``effectively eliminate the death penalty'' and ``encourages a quota system for death penalty cases.''
The Clinton administration has had an ambiguous position on the racial justice provision. During committee action last month, two Justice Department officials said the administration opposed that section of the bill. Last week, another department official said the administration was neutral.
On other crime issues, the House voted to require the Justice Department to pay for the imprisonment of illegal immigrants who commit felonies, ban the use of weightlifting equipment by federal inmates and allow law enforcement officials and courts to review criminal records in ``stalking'' and domestic violence cases.
by CNB