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Capital Punishment is the legal infliction of the
death penalty. In the United States capital
punishment is legal in thirty-nine of the fifty
states. Beginning in 1973, prison populations began
an inevitable growth. There were 204,211 inmates in
1973, and by 1977 the number of prisoners had grown to
285,456, which later grew to 315,974 in 1980. By
1976, it was clear that the death penalty had to be
reinstated. America’s twenty-one year experiment with
capital punishment has resulted in a total of 392
executions, seventy eight of which took place in 1996
alone. Of these only thirty-four were federal cases,
out of which thirty two were male and only two were
female.
Every year about 15,000 killers are charged and only
about 300 wind up on death row. The death row
population is constantly increasing. It is now more
than 3,000. Because of constant appeals, it takes a
person on death row typically between five to eight
years to finally get executed. To kill all the
prisoners on death row, it is estimated that it would
take two executions a day for seven years.
Crimes such as aiding in suicide, causing a boat
collision resulting in death, forced marriage,
procuring an abortion resulting in the death of the
mother, espionage, castrating another, rape, homicide,
child molesting resulting in death and conspiracy to
kidnap for ransom among many others are, in some
states, crimes that are punishable by death. What the
law permits, however, is not always used by the courts
or the executive authorities. Most executions are a
result of a murder or rape, and a small number for
robbery, kidnapping, burglary, aggravated assault and
espionage.
In the US, the death penalty is currently authorized
in one of five ways: hanging, which has been the
traditional method of execution throughout the
English-speaking world; electrocution, which was
introduced by New York State in 1890; the gas chamber
which was first adopted by Nevada in 1923; the firing
squad which is used only in Utah and Idaho, and lethal
injection which was introduced in 1977 by Oklahoma and
is the most common form of execution in the US.
Capital punishment is legal in Washington State,
Montana, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota,
Nebraska, Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico,
Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi,
Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Illinois, Indiana,
Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, New Hampshire, New York,
Ohio, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, West
Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New
Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington DC. Out of
these, lethal injection is legal in thirty two states,
electrocution in ten states, the gas chamber in five
states, hanging in three states and the firing squad
in two states. Some states use more than one method.
Out of the thirty nine states where the death penalty
is legal, twelve have had no executions. Texas is the
state with the most executions with a total of 127.
Florida and Virginia follow with a huge difference,
only thirty nine executions per state. There are
currently more than 3,000 people on death row, many
without lawyers. Texas has the most, an amazing 448.
California is a close second with 444. Wyoming, New
Hampshire and New York are currently the only ones
with no criminals on death row. It is unimaginable to
see how blacks, which are only twelve percent of the
US population, are a sweeping forty one percent of the
inmates on death row.
Timothy McVeigh is the new poster boy for capital
punishment. After his home-made bomb exploded in the
Murrah building in Oklahoma city, ending 168 innocent
lives, including those of nineteen children, McVeigh
is being prosecuted in courtroom C-204 in the United
Stated Courthouse in Denver Colorado. This has been a
two-year effort to execute the twenty nine year old
man whom defendants are trying to make look like “the
boy next door.” The defendant’s lawyers emphasized
the fact that “he was brought up in a typical American
family in upstate New York, and he won the Bronze Star
for his combat service during the Persian Gulf War.”
Timothy was a man loved not only be family, but by his
friends and neighbors as well. It was very obvious
throughout the trial that McVeigh is smart and alert
and in no way mentally impaired.
As the case progressed, Timothy seemed emotionally
unaffected, unlike the jurors, lawyers and, at one
point, the Honorable Richard P. Matsch. “The crime
was pure savagery, premeditated and unprovoked.”
Although the defense will not allow McVeigh to
testify, they are making it quite clear that he loved
his country, but came to believe that “ the federal
government... had become master, had declared war on
the American people.” Timothy’s bomb is practically
identical to the one found in the plot of his favorite
book, which is a racist and anti-Semitic book about a
bomb attack on FBI headquarters in Washington by
antigovernment “patriots.” McVeigh’s bomb, however
was worst, due to the fact that in the book, no
children were killed. It is almost impossible to
believe that on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh killed
168 innocent people out of fanaticism and hatred for
his government.
There are many reasons why the Oklahoma City bomber
deserves the death sentence, nonetheless, jurors were
asked not to let their feelings be a determining
factor when deciding the verdict. Evidence designed
to stir emotions, such as wedding pictures, poetry,
and the testimony of a boy who misses his mother would
be inadmissible. Jurors were also asked by the judge
not to seek revenge and to ask themselves the
following questions: Why does America put people to
death? Is the death penalty meant to benefit society
or to provide comfort to the victims? There is an
important distinction that must be made between
revenge and retribution. “Revenge is a hot, deeply
personal desire to hurt the malefactor, and
retribution is a statelier and more carefully
considered decision to uphold the values of society.”
The main question for the jurors, however, is to
determine whether Timothy should die by lethal
injection or spend the rest of his life in one of the
jails in the federal corrections system. If the
jurors would happen to decide against the death
penalty, the state of Oklahoma could force him to face
the death penalty a second time. Oklahoma has a long
history of voting for the death penalty and has many
inmates currently on death row. Some people believe
that this is precisely the case that the death penalty
was intended for. Even though there is weighty
support for the death penalty, some people are
doubtful when it comes to taking the life of another
human being. It is also a probability that the death
penalty could trigger further violence by the gun
crazies and millennial extremists. When making the
death penalty decision, jurors must respond three
questions: Will the defendant eventually be released,
which means he could possibly kill again, if he is not
sentenced to die? Did the defendant show any regret?
Was the crime notably brutal? In general, fifty six
percent think a convicted murder should get the death
penalty if he was driven by political or ideological
beliefs, and only thirty six percent oppose.
McVeigh’s old army friend, Terry Nichols, helped blow
up the federal building in Oklahoma City with a
massive fertilizer bomb. Nichols awaits his trial on
the charges that he helped plan and carry out the
crime and to destroy the evidence. If convicted,
Nichols could also find himself face to face with the
death penalty. Evidence against Terry include
blasting caps found in his basement, explosives that
had been stolen from the quarry months before, a
receipt for 2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate with
McVeigh’s fingerprint, and the rented Ryder truck used
for the bombing.
Other examples of criminals who have suffered
capital punishment include Rolando Cruz and another
Chicago man. They were both sentenced to death in
1985 for the abduction, death, and murder of a
ten-year-old little girl named Jeanine Nicarico.
Because the prosecution had based its case on a vision
statement, the conviction was overturned. There was
another man who had actually confessed to the murder,
however, he was never allowed to testify, and Cruz was
convicted again on the evidence of a dream regarding
the crime that he confessed he had. Cruz’s conviction
was overturned once more and it wasn’t until a third
trial that DNA evidence cleared his name. Rolando
Cruz was finally acquitted in November 1995. After
eleven years, he is finally free.
On June 13, 1997, ten minutes past midnight, a former
Ku Klux Klan member was killed just outside Mobile,
Alabama by high voltage which slammed into his brain.
His name was Henry Francis Hays. He was convicted in
1981 for abducting, brutally beating and cutting, then
strangling a black teenage boy named Michael Donald
after a jury failed to convict him. This was supposed
to be a show of strength. Hays’ friend and accomplice
got life imprisonment. It took sixteen years to
finally execute Hays, and the execution went virtually
unnoticed. Only ten people gathered outside the
prison gates, and the press barely covered it.
Federal prisoners currently on death row include the
marijuana grower David Rolando Chandler who was
convicted in May 1991 for hiring a man to kill a
police informer and Juan Raul Garza who was given the
death sentence in 1993 because of his connection to
three murders committed in Brownsville. Cory Johnson,
Richard Tipton, and James Roane Jr. are three crack
dealers that were sentenced to death in 1988 for a
string of murders designed to expand their
territories. Other death row inmates include Louis
Jones who was sentenced to death in 1995 for
kidnapping, raping, and murdering a female soldier
from a Texas military base and Anthony George Battle
who was already serving life in prison when he killed
a corrections officer. The other names are Orlando
Hall, Bruce Webster, Len Davis, Paul Hardy and
Bountaem Chanthadara.
As executions increase, so do the charges that the
death penalty is unfair. “Factors such as race and
poor lawyering can be as decisive as a murder’s
seriousness.” An overwhelming majority of capital
cases involve crimes committed against people who are
white. Blacks who kill whites are sentenced to death
at a far higher rate than whites who kill blacks. In
the U.S., the chief objection to capital punishment
has been that it has always been used unfairly, in at
least three major ways. First, women are rarely
sentenced to death and executed, even though 20
percent of all homicides in recent years have been
committed by women. Second, a disproportionate number
of nonwhites are sentenced to death and executed.
Third, poor and friendless defendants, those with
inexperienced or court-appointed counsel, are most
likely to be sentenced to death and executed.
Defenders of the death penalty, however, believe that
discrimination is not a sufficient reason for
abolishing the death penalty. Although people like
President Clinton, the Supreme Court, and many federal
state lawmakers back capital punishment, the American
Bar Association believes that executions should stop
until reforms are enacted.
No one today questions the necessity for punishing
criminals by depriving them of their freedom for
periods of time, however, there is ardent discussion
regarding the topic of the death sentence. Questions
such as when, how, and to whom it should be applied
are crucial when discussing the subject. The very
existence of capital punishment is, in many occasions,
questioned. The people who defend it believe it is
legitimate and necessary, and those who oppose it
believe it is unjustifiable and outdated.
Many times the question is life or death, mercy or
vengeance. Is capital punishment meant to benefit
society or provide comfort to the victimized? It is
an international ongoing debate. Some people think
that capital punishment serves to remind us of the
moral order in our law, that some animals need
killing, if only to remind the rest of us animals how
to live. Other people’s opinions differ, however.
They believe that life without parole is, in some
ways, more retributive than death. It forces the
convict to accept his punishment for the rest of his
life, and it makes us morally energetic about
punishment. There are, on the other hand, some
Americans that want to see more executions with fewer
appeals and delays, especially those who live in the
“Death Belt” states of Texas, Florida, Virginia,
Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Alabama, which
together make up for seventy-eight percent of the
executions in America. Other folks feel that death
is the most irrevocable of all sanctions and that they
should use the usual alternative to the death penalty
which is long-term or life imprisonment. These people
emphasize the fact that there is possibility of
perjured testimony, mistaken honest testimony and
human error. There is no way of knowing how many
innocent persons have been executed. The death
penalty decisions must be unanimous by the convicting
jury.
The fundamental questions raised by the death penalty
are whether it is an effective obstacle to violent
crime, and whether it is more effective than the
alternative of long-term imprisonment. Defenders of
the death penalty insist that because taking an
offender's life is a more severe punishment than any
prison term, it must be the better deterrent.
Supporters also argue that it is better to kill the
criminal before he can commit another crime or murder,
even while he or she is incarcerated. Those who argue
against the death penalty as an obstacle to crime so
that the adjacent states, in which one has a death
penalty and the other does not, show no significant
long-term differences in the murder rate; states that
use the death penalty seem to have a higher number of
homicides than states that do not use it; states that
abolish and then reintroduce the death penalty do not
seem to show any significant change in the murder
rate; and no change in the rate of homicides in a
given city or state seems to occur following a local
execution. Criminologists affirm that there is that
no conclusive evidence that exists to show that the
death penalty is a more effective impediment to
violent crime than long-term imprisonment.
There is a margin of more than two-to-one people
that support the death penalty. Seventy-four percent
of the people are in favor of the death penalty for
individuals convicted of serious crimes, but only
forty-five percent think it deters people from
committing crimes. A sweeping sixty percent don’t
think that vengeance is a legitimate reason for
killing a murderer.
Many court decisions of the 1980s and early 1990s
have lowered bars to executions. In 1986 the Court
ruled that opponents of executions may be barred from
juries in murder cases. The following year the Court
ruled that the law may be applied to accomplices in
crimes that led to murder, then rejected a challenge
to capital punishment based on statistics that
indicated racial bias in sentencing. In separate
decisions in 1989 the Court decided that the death
penalty could be applied to those who were mentally
retarded or who were underage, but at least 16, at the
time of the murder. In the early 1990s the trend of
Supreme Court rulings was to cut back on the appeals
that Death Row inmates could make to the federal
courts.
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