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Death Penalty's Failings
DANA KELLEY
Last
week, 36 years after first being convicted
of capital murder, Robert Lee Massie was
executed in California. Massie's experience
with capital punishment is a prototypical
example of why the death penalty as we know
it is a failure.
It might have taken longer for justice to be
served in Massie's case had he not dropped his
appeals last year to protest California's
slow-paced death penalty system. As late as the
Monday night before his Tuesday execution,
the U.S. Supreme Court had to affirm that he
was competent to stop appealing his own
execution.
It is hard to get executed in California, where
more than 100 inmates have been awaiting
execution for more than 15 years. As a
practical deterrent, a 15-year delay negates any
serious thought about consequences. Add in the
legal circus of endless appeals, arguments and
technicality challenges and you have a picture
perfect example of why capital punishment has
been gutted as a crime-fighting tool.
Death can be one of the strongest deterrents.
It keeps us from jaywalking on expressways,
for example. But like all deterrents, it's
effective only when it is certain and swift.
Neither applies to our modern death penalty,
which more aptly could be referred to as the
Death Row penalty.
If we examine the 22 executions carried out
during the first three months of this year, the
first glaring inconsistency is in the length of
time between the crimes and their punishments.
The average elapsed time between conviction
and execution is just over 14 years. Three of
those 22 waited more than 20 years. During the
first quarter of this year, our society has
endured approximately 5,000 murders, and yet
we've only executed 22; fewer still if we count
only those executed against their will.
So let's do some quick calculations. If a
criminal is contemplating a capital crime, the
first factor might be the likelihood of getting
caught. Most crimes go unsolved, and it's been
estimated that the average criminal commits
eight crimes for every one he's convicted of. So
detection and capture are not by any means
certain.
Next thing is, what if he is caught and
convicted? Even if he's caught red-handed and
condemned to die, he's not likely to be
executed before 2015, which is a lifetime away
to the young male demographic most violent
thugs fall into. Since 1967, there has been about
one execution for every 1,600 murders, or 0.06
percent. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime
Report and Bureau of Justice Statistics,
between 1967-96 there were approximately
560,000 murders and 358 executions. Put
crudely, them ain't bad odds.
When measured against the spoils of their
crimes, which will likely be gained within
hours, most criminals will roll the dice. And as
our recent history bears out, they win more
than they lose.
The death penalty, of course, has never been
and was never intended to be a panacea. It has
been and should be both the ultimate
punishment for particularly heinous crimes and
a deterrent to criminals considering those kinds
of crimes.
The sad truth is the death penalty could
work. The question is, does our society care
enough to prod our political leaders to make it
work?
Robert Lee Massie was first sentenced to
death in 1965 after shooting Mildred Weiss, a
mother of two, outside her house after a
botched follow-home robbery. His sentence
was commuted to life when the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional
in 1972. In 1978, he was paroled, and less than
eight months later, he had killed another
innocent victim, Boris Naumoff, in yet another
robbery.
Given the current trend to extend
responsibility for crimes backward, as in
charging that gun manufacturers are responsible
for firearm crimes, there's a case to be made
that the California parole board was in fact
responsible for Naumoff's death.
If Massie had been executed following his
first murder, he decidedly could not have
murdered his second victim. But since most of
us don't lose a friend or family member to
violent crime, most of us don't truly empathize
with the Weisses or the Naumoffs. In fact,
except for the fact that Massie was such a
longtime Death Row inmate, most of us would
never have heard of him. The other 21 people
executed so far this year are substantially
anonymous. So there's never a sustained
wellspring of outrage sufficient to move
lawmakers on the issue.
It's odd that we hardly blink at the relatively
minor news of our fighters bombing Iraq, killing
more innocent people in a day than our total
annual executions of convicted murderers. We
just tacitly--and approvingly--understand that
what keeps rogue nations in line is the threat of
the death penalty via American military force.
But our criminal death penalty, like so many
things, has fallen prey to special-interest
demagoguery. It should be a judicious criminal
justice tool, used primarily to deter the planned
violent crimes, and not only murder but also
rape and robbery. Those are the crimes that
actually can be deterred; that the certainty of a
swift death sentence would likely prevent.
Instead, the death penalty has become so
burdened with regulation and litigation that it
cannot be effective, and then it is blamed for
being ineffective.
Finally, there's the constantly exploited
specter of wrongly executing the "innocent"
person. For the record, there is no proof of
anyone innocent ever being executed in
America in modern times.
The next time someone rambles on about
how it's better to set 100 murderers free than to
execute one innocent person, remind them
about Boris Naumoff. Because all too often
when we set murderers free, we are in fact
sentencing innocent people to death.
Dana D. Kelley is a free-lance writer from
Jonesboro.
This
article was published on Friday, April
6, 2001 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette