Crime & Justice, Headlines, Human Rights, North America

DEATH PENALTY-US: Abolitionists See Victory in View

Adrianne Appel

BOSTON, Mar 16 2007 (IPS) - Campaigners against the death penalty in the U.S. believe the momentum for a country-wide ban on executions is now unstoppable and some are predicting all their death rows will be closed down within 15 years.

“It’s a gathering storm that’s been in the making for a number of years now,” David Elliot of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty told IPS.

Of the 50 U.S. states, 38 have the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.

Two states – Maryland and New Jersey – were on the brink of abolishing the death penalty. Four others – Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina – were also likely to follow swiftly with their state bans, Elliot said.

Others, including Arkansas, Missouri and South Dakota, have placed a moratorium on executing people because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. In California, a federal judge has halted executions and ordered an investigation of the death penalty system in that state.

Within 15 years the entire U.S. death penalty system could be completely gone, Elliot predicted.

In October 2006, there were 3,334 total people on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre. Usually it is the governor of the state who decides when a prisoner will be executed, and it is not untypical for a prisoner to be on death row for 10 years or even longer. Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, 1,064 people in the U.S. have been executed.

Campaigners pinpoint the beginning of the end of capital punishment in the United States to the refusal by Illinois Governor George Ryan to sign execution orders seven years ago.

His bold stand was followed by an official state moratorium that is still in place today.

“Could I send another man’s son to death under the deeply flawed system of capital punishment we have in Illinois?” Ryan asked at the time.

Other state governors and officials have recently publicly voiced their concerns about the fairness of their death penalty systems, especially following reports of painful, inhumane executions and a system that has certainly sent innocent people to their death.

Maryland’s governor Martin O’Malley is one of the governors who have been taking an active part in the current national abolition debate.

“Since 1978, we have executed five people and set one convicted man free when his innocence was discovered. Are any of us willing to sacrifice a member of our own family – wrongly convicted, sentenced and executed – in order to secure the execution of five rightly convicted murderers?” O’Malley argued in a recent article in The Washington Post.

In Montana, Assistant Attorney-General John Connor, one of the state’s leading public prosecutors, announced to the legislature there that he no longer wants to be associated with the death penalty.

“It seems to me to be the ultimate incongruity to say we respect life so much that we’re going to dedicate all our money, all our resources, our legal expertise and our entire system to try and take your life… Frankly, I just don’t think I can do it anymore,” Connor told state legislators, according to Associated Press news agency.

Across the country some 123 death row inmates have been declared innocent over the past 30 years, Maryland lawyer Paul B. DeWolfe said in an interview with IPS. Many of these have spoken out about their treatment and many people did not like what they heard.

“It’s because of these cases that the pendulum has started to swing away from the death penalty,” DeWolfe said.

One of those exonerated and today actively campaigning against the death penalty is Juan Melendez. He was freed from a Florida prison in 2002, after being on death row for almost 18 years.

He told IPS that he suffered most on death row when the guards took away for execution someone who had lived beside him in an adjoining cell and he had grown to love.

“They had the electric chair then and it used 2,010 volts. When the lights went on and off [in the prison] I knew they were burning the life out of him and I could not stop it,” he said.

The prison was infested with cockroaches and rats and there was no air conditioning, he said.

Hundreds of citizen groups, religious organisations, lawyers and legislators have joined together with activists like Melendez to give the abolition movement the persistent momentum it has today.

The campaigning focuses on many issues.

Cost is one.

“Killing two old men every year for 50 million dollars? There are better ways to make the public safer,” Mark Elliott, of Florida Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told IPS.

Racism is another. The U.S. death penalty system is seen as discriminating heavily against people of colour.

“It is particularly interesting that since 1769 there has never been a white person executed for killing a black person. That’s the reality of the death penalty in Florida,” Elliott said.

And intense scrutiny of lethal injection – the method of execution used in 37 states – has followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that provided the legal means to halt executions in many states.

“It was sold to us as a kinder more humane way to die. What we’re learning is that there’s no kind, humane, nice way to execute someone,” said Elliot of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that death row prisoners could argue before courts that lethal injection is a violation of the 8th Amendment of the U.S. constitution. This bars cruel and unusual punishment. Ten states swiftly halted all executions. The Supreme Court came to its decision while considering the Florida case of Clarence Hill, a man with the mental capacity of a 10-year-old who had been on death row for almost a quarter century.

Despite the historic court ruling, Hill’s life was not spared. Three months later, the then governor, Jeb Bush ordered his execution warrant and Hill was killed by lethal injection. It was only a few months later that Florida executed another prisoner, Angel Nieves Diaz. His death took 34 minutes.

“It surely seemed to unleash a firestorm of activity,” D. Todd Doss, a lawyer for both Hill and Diaz, told IPS.

Polls now show that a slim majority of U.S. citizens would prefer life without parole to executions, Judi Caruso, of the New Mexico Coalition to Repeal the Death Penalty, told IPS. A 2006 Gallup Poll showed for the first time in 20 years that citizens are turning away from the death penalty with 48 percent preferring life imprisonment without parole.

“They’re re-evaluating the system that is broken and broken beyond repair,” Caruso said.