
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 3, 1994                   TAG: 9404030140
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: D-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TYSON'S CORNER                                LENGTH: Medium

NO TAKERS YET FOR TELEVISED EXECUTIONS

Perhaps it's a crassly commercial appeal to public blood lust. Or perhaps it's the ultimate way for society to bear witness to its most extreme form of punishment.

Either way, "Death Watch" would turn up the heat in the debate over capital punishment by the live broadcast of executions.

"We want to put on pay TV an actual execution," said Northern Virginia lawyer Mark Sandground, founder of a production group that hopes to eventually air an "execution of the month."

The program would educate people about the death penalty and be a deterrent to violent crime, Sandground said.

The idea, which would need cooperation from state prison systems, sits uneasily with advocates and opponents of capital punishment alike.

"It's going back to Roman times. I think it is an assault on our civilization, especially the commercialization," said Del. Bernard Cohen, D-Alexandria. Cohen supports the death penalty but opposed as ghoulish a bill in the Virginia legislature this year to allow relatives of a murder victim to witness the killer's execution.

The bill failed, but Gov. George Allen pledged to change Department of Corrections rules to allow the practice.

"I find the whole proposal fairly barbaric," said Leigh Dingerson, director of the Washington-based National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

"The death penalty issue is much bigger than the way someone dies. It's much more than the 40-second process of snuffing out someone's life," she said.

From the Roman lions to stonings, hangings and firing squads, Western society traditionally exacted its pound of flesh publicly. There were public executions in this country into the 1950s, Dingerson said.

But since the Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976, executions have been largely closeted rituals.

Sandground and Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Michael Shapiro are shopping their pay-per-view execution to television networks and producers, so far without success.

"I find the idea abhorrent. I want no part of it," Warner Bros. executive Edward Bleier wrote in a January letter to Shapiro.

by CNB