By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jul 1 2008 (IPS)

It’s not easy to explain why, virtually alone among advanced industrial democracies, the United States holds on to the practice of capital punishment. The United Nations General Assembly recently passed a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment and most advanced industrial democracies have outlawed the death penalty. Capital punishment is coming to be seen in much of the world as an ultimate abuse of human rights. In continuing to embrace the practice, the United States finds itself aligned with nations whose human rights records it routinely condemns -China, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Why it persists in this globally unpopular policy and why the American public continues to support it by two-thirds majorities- is a source of puzzlement., writes Mark Sommer, host of A World of Possibilities, an award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program. Today, 35 states have capital punishment laws on their books but just ten maintain active execution programs. A number of Midwestern and Northeastern states have abolished capital punishment. About 3,350 people languish today on \”death row,\” and keeping them there is an immensely expensive proposition. The great majority are poor and a significant number are mentally disturbed. More than 40 percent are African American (four times their proportion in the general population), and disproportionate numbers are Native American, Latino, and Asian. Most experts on the death penalty decline to speculate as to why the United States hold so firmly to capital punishment. It’s not enough to say that it’s a tenet of conservatism in an era of conservative ascendancy since recent surveys reveal that even Barack Obama, an unapologetic liberal, finds it necessary to support the death penalty in cases in which “the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage.\”

Capital punishment has a deep-rooted history in the US. State-sanctioned executions hark back to the country’s colonial days, when the practice was imported from England but applied to a narrower range of crimes. In the course of more than 200 years, some 14,000 Americans have been put to death by the order of the state. In the mythic popular rendering of the Wild West, frontier justice followed the Biblical dictum of “an eye for an eye,” though with scant reverence for its source and less than consistent application of the law. The death penalty was most actively applied in the first half of the twentieth century, when 150 people or more were put to death annually. But it began to be called into question during the civil rights movement of the sixties, when its vastly disproportionate toll on African Americans and other minorities first came to public notice.

In the late sixties, federal courts, then in a far more liberal temper than today’s bench, began handing down decisions that effectively if only temporarily halted executions. In 1972 U.S Supreme Court invalidated hundreds of death sentences, declaring that state laws were being applied in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner that violated constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process. But in 1976, the Court revived the death penalty, opening the way to the execution of over a thousand death row inmates over the next thirty years.

Today, 35 states have capital punishment laws on their books but just ten maintain active execution programs. A number of Midwestern and Northeastern states have abolished capital punishment. About 3,350 people languish today on “death row,” and keeping them there is an immensely expensive proposition. The great majority are poor and a significant number are mentally disturbed. More than 40 percent are African American (four times their proportion in the general population), and disproportionate numbers are Native American, Latino, and Asian.

Most experts on the death penalty decline to speculate as to why the United States hold so firmly to capital punishment. It’s not enough to say that it’s a tenet of conservatism in an era of conservative ascendancy since recent surveys reveal that even Barack Obama, an unapologetic liberal, finds it necessary to support the death penalty in cases in which “the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage.”

Yet even in his home state of Illinois, it was a Republican governor, George Ryan, who instituted a January 2000 moratorium on executions to re-evaluate the state’s death row inmates on the basis of newly available DNA testing. In so doing, he commuted the sentences of all the state’s death row inmates and said, “Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error, error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?”

In the past few years there has been modest movement even in an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court to limit the range of crimes to which the death penalty applies. In 2002, the court barred the execution of mentally retarded defendants, in 2005, it ruled against the death penalty for crimes committed before the age of 18, and in June 2008 the court struck down the death penalty for the rape of a child. In this most recent case, Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority, asserted that “when the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality,” T

Yet the moral case against capital punishment is unlikely to carry the day on its own in a country whose religiosity recalls the Biblical injunction, “an eye for an eye,” but fails to note the Gandhian amendment, “till all the world is blind.” In the end, it may be more practical considerations that tip the balance in favor of de facto if not formal abolition. Maintaining death row facilities and dealing with decades of litigation costing millions per case is an exceedingly expensive proposition. In an era of declining economies and shrinking state budgets, death row inmates cost vastly more than “lifers” to maintain. The cost of a new death row facility slated for construction at California’s San Quentin penitentiary has ballooned to $400 million, and at current rates of death row sentencing will be full within three years of completion.

Americans may soon be forced to choose between retribution for criminals and health care or education for their children. It may then be hard to tell which is the greater crime, the sparing of life for those who have taken it or the deprivation of opportunity for those just starting theirs. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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