ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 4, 1997 TAG: 9702040086
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
IN CALLING Monday for a nationwide moratorium on imposing the death penalty, the American Bar Association's policy-making House of Delegates made an excellent point.
The administration of capital punishment in America today is indeed, as the ABA put it, "a haphazard maze of unfair practices with no internal consistency," and it is getting worse rather than better.
But the ABA position does not go far enough. Even if you were to devise and implement an absolutely fair system for administering the absolute penalty - no racial bias, adequate counsel for all defendants, application of uniform standards by all judges and juries - you'd still have an underlying and unavoidable unfairness.
To punish heinous crimes such as cold-blooded murder, the law-abiding members of society are unfairly forced through their authorized representatives to participate in cold-blooded killing.
Politicians, including a Clinton administration that opposed the ABA resolution, appear to believe the public is a bloodthirsty lot that wants more and more executions. Hundreds of people have been put to death since capital punishment was reinstituted in 1976; the pace is accelerating, and more than 3,000 men and women now await their fates on death rows across America.
No votes are lost, the reasoning seems to be, by too vigorously supporting the death penalty.
But that reasoning may be in error. Capital punishment instead may be putting the law-abiding public in a moral squeeze. Given the choice between putting murderers to death and letting them go free to murder again after a few years in prison, Americans of course prefer the former. But if the choice is between the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole, polls show, a majority favors the latter.
Ironically, tougher sentencing and parole laws, including in Virginia, have reintroduced life imprisonment without parole as a realistic possibility. But they haven't been around long enough for people to be entirely confident they'll be around for a good while longer.
The ABA says it lacks confidence in the system's ability to administer capital punishment fairly. Of course. Murderers are significantly more likely to get the death penalty if their victims are white, for example, than if they are black. Depending on what state a defendant lives in, how much money he has, and many other factors, his chances of facing execution remain, in America, a crapshoot.
Not that we harbor sympathy for murderers. The point is: If the system could restore confidence in the fair administration of their death, it could also restore confidence that life imprisonment means life imprisonment - in which case, public support for capital punishment might well evaporate. It is a day we look forward to.
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