"When the state itself kills," said Attorney General Ramsey Clark, "the. mandate 'Thou shalt not kill' loses the force of the absolute." Giving the Administration's backing for abolition of the federal death penalty, Clark told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that "state-inflicted death chiefly serves to remind us how close we remain to the jungle." In failing to abolish the death penalty nationwide, the U.S. lags behind 73 foreign countries as well as 13 of its own states,* which have abolished the death sentence.
It is unlikely that the bill will reach the Senate floor, at least in a session when most politicians are plumping for stiffer crime controls to get votes. It is just this connection between crime and death sentences that the testimony sought to discredit. After Delaware, for example, reinstated capital punishment in 1961, there was an increase rather than a decrease in the number of murders. The five states with the highest murder rates—Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida and Mississippi —also were among the leaders in executions between 1930 and 1965.
Final Judgment. While death sentences continue to be meted out by most states and federal courts, executions are rarely performed. Compared with 1935, when there were 199, there was one in 1966 and two in 1967. Nevertheless, death row in the nation's prisons is still populated by 435 men, ranging in age from 16 to 68.
The great majority of those awaiting execution are Negroes—a proportion that has held steady ever since prison records were first kept. Between 1930 and the present, 2,066 blacks have been put to death, against 1,751 whites. Among the commonest capital charges against Negroes, especially in the South, has been rape, which is extremely difficult to prove. Yet rape convictions have accounted for executions of 405 Negroes compared with 50 of whites.
Few well-to-do prisoners are ever executed. "During my experience as Governor of Ohio," testified Michael V. DiSalle, now chairman of the National Committee to Abolish the Federal Death Penalty, "I found that the men in death row had one thing in common: they were penniless." In his four years as Governor, DiSalle passed final judgment on twelve men, six of whom went to the chair. The burden of their deaths, which still weighs on him, helps to explain the fall-off in the number of executions. For while judges and juries continue to sentence men to death, it is the Governors, in state convictions, or the President, in federal cases, who must make the final life-or-death judgment.
* The 13: Michigan, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Iowa, West Virginia, New York, Vermont.