TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060391/0603110.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                LAW, Page 59

The Ultimate Horror Show


A court hearing pits First Amendment rights against the fear of
an electronic return to the rite of public execution

By JILL SMOLOWE -- Reported by Bonnie Angelo/New York and Robert
W. Hollis/San Francisco


    The voice-over is easy to script. "Robert Alton Harris
was executed yesterday at San Quentin prison. He was the first
California prisoner in 24 years to be put to death "

    The video images are also easy to imagine. Harris being
strapped to a chair. Cyanide pellets dropping into sulfuric
acid. Fumes filling San Quentin's green-walled gas chamber.
Harris gasping his final breaths, twitching.

    Far more difficult to predict is how viewers will react to
the video footage of the event. When -- and if -- the time
comes, what will spectators do? Lean in toward the screen,
fascinated? Cringe in horror? Cover their children's eyes? When
Harris' body goes limp, many will breathe a sigh of relief. But
will it be for the murderer? His victims? Themselves?

    We may have a chance to find out, if public television
station KQED triumphs in a June 7 hearing before a federal court
in San Francisco and is permitted to broadcast Harris'
execution. A career crim inal, Harris was convicted in 1979 of
the murder the preceding year of two teenage boys in San Diego.
He is the first of 301 death-row convicts in California in line
for execution.

    In its lawsuit, which was filed in May 1990, KQED argues
the public's right to know. "Giving voters accurate information
about the administration of the death penalty is especially
important in California, where capital punishment was enacted by
voter initiative." Television correspondents with cameras, the
station contends, should have just as much right to cover the
event as newspaper reporters carrying notebooks. (In the wake
of the KQED lawsuit, San Quentin authorities barred all
journalists of any kind from the execution.)

    But the issues go beyond an abstract debate over First
Amendment press rights. At the heart of the case are troubling
emotional questions about whether a social need is met by
graphically showing justice being served in its most extreme
form. Viewing an execution could repulse so many people that it
might lead to a backlash against the death penalty. Or it could
kindle a disquieting Dickensian excitement that appeals to
society's most morbid instincts. Or, at a time of fear about
rising lawlessness, televised executions might grimly satisfy
the public's urge to see that society's most brutal criminals
receive the full brunt of justice.

    Capital-punishment opponents are divided; the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, an organization with 120
affiliated groups, has taken no stance. Some members argue that
if Americans want the death penalty, they should face the
consequences of their action squarely. If they cannot bear the
thought of watching public executions, then they may realize
that it does not make moral sense to permit executions in
private either. Other death-penalty opponents maintain that
whatever the potential gains, televised executions are too
ghoulish to consider. Says Donald Gillmor, professor of media
ethics at the University of Minnesota: "I don't like our return
to an era of public hanging."

    Death-penalty proponents are similarly split. Ernest van
den Haag, a former law professor at Fordham University who
supports the death penalty, fears that televised executions
might stir a misplaced sympathy for murderers. "Our compassion
for the murderer whose life is cut short before our eyes may
overcome our sense of justice," he argues, "for we are not shown
his innocent victims nor how he murdered them." The fear of a
public backlash is countered by the argument that once citizens
view their first execution, the next one will not seem so
terrible, and anti-death penalty fervor may even subside.

    The debate over whether the death penalty is a deterrent
to crime is writ large when it comes to televising it. The
horrible images, proponents say, would certainly give pause to
potential criminals. Others contend that the gruesome thrill of
watching a state-sanctioned murder could, in some twisted way,
make all murder seem more acceptable. "There is evidence that
immediately following an execution, violence increases," says
Martin Rosenthal of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard
Law School. "It puts out the subliminal message that the
solution is violence." Inside San Quentin, authorities are
concerned that other death-row inmates, who have TV sets in
their cells, may be impelled to violence if they witness Harris'
execution.

    But the debate over the death penalty is about more than
deterrence, and so too is the debate over televising executions.
Some crimes are so heinous that society thirsts for vengeance
against the perpetrators. That base yet understandable desire,
in addition to mere morbid curiosity, is what prompted thousands
of spectators to turn out in Kentucky for the last public
execution in America, the hanging of Rainey Bethea in 1936, and
at other such spectacles throughout history.

    If KQED wins its case and the scene of Harris' last breath
is broadcast into the nation's living rooms, will people judge
it to be a disturbing atrocity or a darkly satisfying rite? And
how will they feel when the image replays not only on their
screens but in their minds, as it undoubtedly will?