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

DATE: FRIDAY, April 8, 1994                   TAG: 9404090004
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: William Raspberry
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DEATH PENALTY

I KEEP vacillating on the issue of capital punishment long after everybody else's mind is made up. I think I've figured out why. There really are two death-penalty questions - both of them difficult (for me) and subject to the emotions of the moment.

The first is whether it can be right for the government to take a life. The second is whether the government can be trusted to do it fairly.

To take the first: What's the purpose of official killing? To prevent capital offenders from doing it again? (But isn't that the purpose of life imprisonment?) To register the society's outrage? (Don't we leave criminal justice to the government precisely because we fear to leave it to people driven by emotion?) To exterminate the dangerous and irredeemable? (Again, why not life imprisonment - without the possibility of parole?)

How is the premeditated killing of a shackled convict for societal vengeance morally superior to the premeditated murder for which the convict is being executed? In what way is the official who pulls the switch or drops the cyanide tablet or administers the lethal injection better than the band of outraged citizens who hang the culprit from the nearest tree? Indeed, given the fact that it can be many years between the act and the execution, I have serious doubt that the person we kill is even the same person we first charged.

I make a distinction here between the calculated killing of defenseless individuals and the slaughter of enemy forces in time of war. Nations at war are very much like individuals locked in deadly combat: more concerned with self-preservation than with the means of achieving it. That's one reason why nations try to avoid war except as a last, desperate measure.

I distinguish, too, between killings by police to protect citizens (or themselves) and the official, cold-blooded killings of the execution chamber. I don't like the idea of the government saying that certain of its subjects are unfit to live.

And then come the real-world vermin that make all my doubts seem like intellectual nonsense. I don't know what brutishness, if any, pushes you toward the death-penalty supporters. For me, the shove comes from names like John Wayne Gacy or the killers of Pam Basu, Catherine Fuller, Stephanie Roper.

But just when I'm ready to say yes to death, there comes another reminder of how unfairly the death penalty is administered. Rep. Don Edwards, D-Calif., recently issued a report - ``Racial Disparities in Federal Death Penalty Prosecutions'' - that makes the case.

Since 1988, 33 of the 37 federal death penalty prosecutions - including all of those approved by Attorney General Janet Reno - have involved minority defendants.

Since 1976, 84 percent of the victims of those executed under federal law have been white.

Nearly 90 percent of the men executed in the states for the crime of rape since 1930 have been black.

You can argue, of course, that most of the people who commit the dastardly deeds worthy of the death penalty happen to be black. Maybe so, but just look at those numbers - 33 out of 37 federal cases and 90 percent of the rapes. You think that reflects reality? And, at a time when black-on-black crime is the scourge of the nation, 84 percent of the executions have involved crimes of which whites were victims.

I'm not just saying We haven't been fair with capital punishment. I'm saying We can't be. Look at my own short list of cases that nudge me toward blood-vengeance. You know what's peculiar about that list, now that I see it? famous crimes - It is a reminder that One of the engines driving death-penalty legislation is the media. The cases in which prosecutors seek death are likely to be those that got lots of ink and air time and, in this class-conscious society, that's likely to mean cases involving white victims.

I'm about ready to sign on with Justice Harry Blackmun, who recently threw up his hands:

``Twenty years have passed since this court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, and, despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake ...

``From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.''

Washington Post Writers Group

by CNB