TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/021389/02138900.000

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 104 lines

ESSAY, Page 96

Politicians, Voters and Voltage

By  Richard M. Cohen


    My family discovered the hulking wooden chair in the basement
one summer morning about 25 years ago. The arms and legs were
deeply scarred from the heavy metal apparatus once tightly fastened
to it. It was, I announced to my parents' horror, the electric
chair, liberated the night before from the ancient and abandoned
Connecticut state prison. The Chair was too big a prize for high
school kids to pass up. Sitting in it brought my imagination to
life, as if I were its next official guest. My teenage
sensibilities told me this was something people should not do to
one another, and though my father did not think the escapade clever
and made me return the chair to the prison that afternoon, my
opposition to the death penalty had been formed. Years later, after
I have lived more than a decade in the big city, been mugged at
gunpoint, and developed, like most of us, a fear of violent crime,
my simplistic and sympathetic notion of the murderer as victim has
been tempered. My opposition to all killing has not.

    George Bush is not opposed to all killing, especially when talk
of frying people can help pull him out of the political fire.
During the campaign, he scored big points with his tough stance on
capital punishment. He supported it on the stump, in the debates,
and through anticrime TV ads trumpeting his belief in the death
penalty. The ads harped on Michael Dukakis' opposition to capital
punishment, a position Dukakis was not shy about proclaiming
anyway. The death penalty is a useful issue for any politician who
believes that voltage wins votes. It works in a campaign, but on
a different level, many Americans have clearly not come to terms
with legalized killing. Politicians are not distinguishing
themselves by the way they face this moral dilemma.

    Take the case of Ronald Monroe, spared for a while by the state
of Louisiana. Only Texas and Florida have put more people to death
since 1977 than Louisiana. Monroe was convicted of murdering Lenora
Collins in her bed one steamy summer night in 1977. Despite a lack
of physical evidence and a jailhouse suggestion by a man in
Michigan that he committed the crime, Louisiana Governor Buddy
Roemer has not acted on the recommendation of his pardon board that
the sentence be commuted to life in prison. Instead, Roemer will
wait to see if the courts get him off the hook before he makes a
final decision. It will be a final decision. With the death
penalty, guilty or not, there is no taking it back.

    Whatever his personal beliefs, Governor Roemer will make that
decision in a political framework. Beyond grappling with the
haunting question "Did he do it?," the Governor will, inescapably,
weigh the political fallout either way he goes. Once again, a
capital case and a person's fate will be determined by a politician
with a partisan agenda. In 1984 North Carolina Governor James Hunt
was waging a fierce battle for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jesse
Helms. Meanwhile, another political battle was raging. Velma
Barfield, a matronly grandmother convicted of murdering her fiance
while under the influence of drugs, was scheduled to be executed
around election time. Barfield had won the sympathies of religious
and political leaders all over the world because of the
circumstances of the crime and her conduct as a prisoner. Despite
pleas that her sentence be commuted so she could continue her
Christian counseling work with fellow prisoners, she was put to
death that November. It was commonly believed that failing to
execute the woman would have had dire political consequences for
Hunt in the race he lost anyway. When Ed Koch ran for mayor of New
York City in the Democratic primary against Mario Cuomo in 1977,
the cutting issue was the death penalty. Even though the mayor of
a city has nothing to do with the administration of justice, Koch
whipped up passions over the electric-chair issue as part of his
toughness campaign and easily claimed city hall.

    The court has said the death penalty is legal, but political
leaders are reluctant to question whether we as a society want to
put it to work. Public opinion studies, which have tilted both ways
in the past 25 years, now show overwhelming support for the death
sentence. Politicians who fan the fires are seeking heat, not
light, and they make reasoned discussion difficult. Capital
punishment tells us a lot about ourselves and our willingness to
create a moral code that rises above destructive anger and the call
for revenge in kind. We seem to have a double standard about death:
it is wrong to murder, but killing in reprisal is O.K. For those
who believe all murder, including executions, is wrong, it will
never be acceptable for society to kill in our name. The trouble
with eye-for-eye justice is that it legitimizes the taking of the
first eye.

    I believe there can be a formula for justice stopping short of
taking human life that won't be dismissed by politicians as too
liberal. There must be a method for treating violent criminals
toughly, even harshly, that won't simply be tossed off as too
conservative. There can be no forgiveness, no compassion for the
criminal who kills. He should face a barren and hopeless life of
incarceration. Perhaps the 50 states should, together, build a
giant maximum-security prison in the desert. Reinvent Dante's
Inferno. Let its inhabitants languish and be forgotten by all
Americans. Just don't kill them for me. I don't want to be a
murderer. Ted Bundy is dead. Would that he were sitting in an empty
cell contemplating his crimes for the next 40 years.

    Liberals have to understand that American patience with violent
crime has been spent. Failure to deal effectively with crime has
increased the public appetite for the death penalty. Conservatives
must see that this society can be hard, even implacable, against
criminals without killing them. If politicians will lower their
voices and quit pandering to our worst fears and baser instincts,
the search for common ground can begin.