Got Capital? No Punishment!

(from a 1994 editorial)

As the legislature prepares to reinstate the death penalty in Iowa, four out of five Iowans say they favor the idea. The pro-death penalty reaction is understandable in the aftermath of the Anna- Marie Emry murder and the gubernatorial campaign that exploited it. But we should still recognize and reject state-sponsored murder as the harsh, discriminatory measure it has repeatedly proven to be.

Recent years have seen racist crime hysteria rising much faster than crime itself. Both political parties are responsible. George Bush's 1988 "Willie Horton ad" was key to what he called his "KKK" strategy of stressing "crime, Kuwait, and quotas." And in 1992, Bill Clinton KKK-O'd Bush after pointedly leaving the campaign trail to preside over the execution of a mentally-retarded Black man in Arkansas.

The result was that while crime had recently gone down 4%, the percentage of people who identified crime as "the main problem facing the country today" rose from 4% to 19% in less than a year. The reality had changed for the better; the public perception had been changed--by politicians and the media--for the worse.

In Iowa--a state that already has the lowest murder rates in the U.S.--debate in last fall's campaign focused on which candidate would be "tougher on crime." While Terry Branstad trumped with the death penalty card, Bonnie Campbell's unprincipled opposition to the measure emphasized its high cost in dollars rather than its inestimable cost in humanity and justice.

The weakness of Campbell's strategy was that the appeals process is what makes the death penalty six times as expensive as a life sentence. Branstad and presidential candidate Arlen Spector were quick to find the "final solution" to that problem. "Don't eliminate the death penalty," they say, "just eliminate the appeals process that makes it so expensive!"

Those who find this idea persuasive should remember that in this century, we know of at least 350 innocent people who have been convicted of capital crimes. Of those 350, 139 received the death penalty, and 23 of them--23 people who turned out to be as innocent as the original victims--were killed by the state; the appeals process just barely saved the lives of the hundred others.

If appeals are now to be fewer in order to cut costs, as Branstad and Spector suggest, how many more innocent people will die? How many murders will we allow to be committed by the state, in our name? This terrible question evidently doesn't trouble the politicians, but I think it probably matters very much to the average Iowan.

If Iowans restore the death penalty, what will we get for the price in money and innocent blood? Advocates of execution often try to base their argument on the deterrent effect of capital punishment. But studies consistently show that the death penalty is not a deterrent. In fact, violent crime rates are higher in states and the few countries that have it, and tend to rise higher still after an execution. Reinstating the death penalty has never resulted in lower murder rates in any state.

The absence of a deterrent effect makes sense when you think about it. Most murders are crimes of passion, committed in the heat of the moment, when people haven't thought about the consequences of their actions and therefore cannot be deterred by those consequences. And by definition, people who commit premeditated murders are planning not to be caught or punished, by the death penalty or any other measure.

But the worst and most widespread problem with the death penalty is the racism and class bias with which it has always been imposed. At least 50% of those executed in the U.S. have been Black, yet Blacks make up only 12% of the U.S. population.

Such a statistic is no surprise considering the racism rampant throughout the U.S. prison system. To take an example close to home, Blacks make up 23% of Iowa's prison population but only 1.7% of the population as a whole. When Black truckdriver Daryl Thompson was beaten up by white Tipton cops, Thompson was the one who was arrested, prosecuted, and threatened with 12 years in prison! If Iowa does reinstate the death penalty, it's clear that the state will kill Blacks disproportionately.

A telling indication of how deep the racism runs within the U.S. "justice" system is the fact that courts discriminate not only on the basis of the race of the offender, but also on the basis of the victim's race. A study of Florida, Georgia, and Texas showed that if you were Black and killed a white person, you had an 89% chance of ending up on death row, while if you were white and killed a Black person, you had about a 5% chance. As one legal expert noted, "Crimes committed by Blacks against whites have always been treated as more serious than those committed by whites against Blacks or Blacks against Blacks."

Intrinsically related to the racism of the death penalty is its bias against the poor and powerless. Senator David Stanley, a conservative Republican who helped repeal Iowa's death penalty in 1965 put it this way: "The man who is hanged is not usually the person who committed the most vicious crime. The man who is hanged is almost always the person who is too poor to hire an outstanding lawyer [and] who has no influential friends."

Stanley's statement is borne out not only by statistics, but by any capital crime one cares to investigate. Take, for example, the case of tobacco heir Steven Benson, who planted a pipe bomb in the family car. "[Benson] blew up his family, for money," one attorney emphasized, "and didn't get the death penalty. The only difference between Benson and people on death row is that Benson...was rich, and rich people don't get the death penalty."

In short, the most glaring injustice of capital punishment is that if you have enough capital, you don't get the punishment.

In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" and therefore unconstitutional. That decision followed a progressive period when Blacks, women, gays and lesbians, and antiwar activists were confident--and winning.

But just four years later, during an economic recession when people were vulnerable, the Court reversed itself and again granted states the right to kill people. Business and government seized the same opportunity to attack affirmative action and roll back poor women's abortion rights. The backlash continues today in unemployment, stagnating wages, assaults on welfare, education, and labor--and politicians' demands for ever longer sentences, ever more prisons, ever more and swifter executions with fewer rights to appeal. Just a few years ago, the Supreme Court actually ruled that the Constitution permits the execution of people known to be innocent, as long as technically they have been given due process.

The timing of these events is no coincidence. Contrary to what we're often told, the Supreme Court is not independent of pressures and trends in the rest of society, and the government is not a neutral arbiter among competing interests. This fact is a double-edged sword, but it is one that we can wield for justice--as we saw in Tipton, where active and vocal protest won Daryl Thompson's release. Those in power concede to us what they must, when they must--and later take back what they can. This is what death penalty opponents and all progressives should remember. It is both the challenge and the hope.