TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/051892/05189933.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 5.9 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 49

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Premeditated Execution


The Supreme Court is the death penalty's final arbiter, but the
U.S. must decide what it achieves

By HENDRIK HERTZBERG/WASHINGTON


    As befits the nation whose supermarkets and shopping malls
bedazzle visitors from less fortunate lands, the U.S. offers
more variety in its ways of putting prisoners to death than any
other country on earth. Under assorted laws in the 36 states of
the union that mandate capital punishment, the condemned may
die, in ascending order of frequency, by being hanged, by being
shot by a firing squad, by inhaling cyanide gas, by
electrocution or -- the newest method and a dog's death in more
ways than one -- by being administered poison through an
intravenous drip. Unlike at the mall, though, there isn't much
choice at the retail level. Only Utah (shooting or hanging) and
Idaho (lethal injection or firing squad) offer the customer a
limited say in how he (death row's population is 98.5% male)
goes.

    In the 100 or so other countries that still punish by
death, the technology of execution is simpler. A handful favor
the headsman's ax or the even more ancient practice of stoning
to death. The rest employ either the rope or the bullet, both
of which have fallen into near total disuse in the U.S. Outside
the U.S., capital punishment in the 1990s is usually associated
with underdevelopment or lack of democracy, usually both. The
death penalty no longer exists in any European Community
country. Most of the nations of the former Soviet bloc have
abolished it, and the rest are considering doing so. Of the
2,086 executions Amnesty International tracked in 1991, 1,859
took place in two countries: China and Iran.

    Capital punishment is not an issue in Western Europe:
there is virtually no agitation to bring it back. It is highly
controversial in the U.S., of course, but far less so than it
ought to be. There is no way to explain the opinion polls that
show large and growing majorities in favor of the death penalty.
Today 2,588 people pace the death row cells of America's
prisons. Another joins them, on average, every day of the year.
Fourteen died in 1991; 16 more have died so far this year. As
the pace of executions mounts, so too, sooner or later, will the
intensity of the debate.

    Stripped to their essentials, the arguments for capital
punishment remain what they have always been: deterrence and
retribution. The first of these arguments is not hard to dispose
of. Despite innumerable studies, no connection between murder
rates and capital punishment has ever been shown. Of course, it
stands to reason -- it's only common sense -- that the
possibility of execution would give a potential murderer pause;
but those who descend into the mental maelstrom of murder tend
to be precisely those who have left reason and common sense
behind.

    The argument for retribution would be even easier to
dismiss if it consisted only of a base thirst for revenge. But
in its most sophisticated form, the argument is far weightier
and more interesting than that. Society, writes Walter Berns,
an eloquent defender of capital punishment, must manifest a
terrible anger in the face of a terrible crime, for nothing less
will suffice to "remind us of the moral order by which alone we
can live as human beings."

    This is a serious moral argument. Opponents of capital
punishment must be willing to answer it on its own terms. And
they do have an answer, which is that the death penalty demeans
that same moral order. Execution is not legalized murder -- any
more than imprisonment is legalized kidnapping -- but it is the
coldest, most premeditated form of homicide of all. It does
something almost worse than lowering the state to the moral
level of the criminal: it raises the criminal to moral equality
with the social order. Indeed, one of the ironies of capital
punishment is that it focuses attention -- and, inevitably,
sympathy -- on the criminal.

    What is it like to be executed? If you die in the gas
chamber, as Robert Alton Harris did in California on April 21,
you may stay conscious for several minutes after the cyanide
pellets drop, experiencing a terrifying sensation of strangling
and sharp pain in the arms, shoulders, back and chest. If you
die in the electric chair, as Roger Coleman is scheduled to do
in Virginia on May 20, you will be literally burned to death
internally -- and you will feel it, for many long seconds.
Afterward, your body will likely be fouled by urine, feces and
vomited blood. It will be too hot to touch for several minutes,
and the smell of cooked flesh will permeate the execution
chamber. If you die by the IV method, as three have in Arkansas
since 1976, you may not experience much physical pain, merely
the psychological agony of being strapped to a table while
waiting to die.

    The wait, of course, will have been longer than the half
hour or so in the death chamber. Albert Camus compared capital
punishment to "a criminal who had warned his victim of the date
at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from
that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months."
But on America's death rows, no one is that lucky. Most
condemned prisoners spend years awaiting execution.

    The Bush Administration and its allies on the Supreme
Court, whose nine Justices are the nation's final arbiters of
life and death, are eager to reduce such waits. Their aim is
not to make capital punishment less terrible but to make it
more routine. The catch, of course, is that every reduction in
the elaborate legal process that has evolved to ensure that
only the guilty die increases the chances that an innocent
person will be subjected to this most irreversible and final of
punishments.