The Death Penalty: An Eye for an Eye

(2 of 12)

killing a ne'er-do-well like himself; Steven Judy in Indiana, for strangling a motorist he waylaid and drowning her three children, ages two to five; and Frank Coppola in Virginia, for bludgeoning to death his robbery victim. Last month in Texas, Charlie Brooks Jr., the only black among the six, achieved a milestone when he became the first American ever executed by means of a drug overdose.

Other states seem anxious to get in step. Two weeks after Brooks was executed, Massachusetts became the 38th state with a death penalty on the books, and Oregon seems likely to become the 39th, 20 years after capital punishment was abolished there by popular vote.*

The national death-row population today is 1,137. That is 200 more than a year ago, twice as many as in 1979, and larger, moreover, than ever before. Florida alone has 189 death-row prisoners, Texas has 153, Georgia and California 118 each. The inmates include about a dozen teenagers, 13 women (five of them in Georgia) and six soldiers. Half of the condemned are white.

The long-building public sentiment to get tough with violent criminals, to kill the killers, seems on the verge of putting the nation's 15 electric chairs, nine gas chambers, several gallows and ad hoc firing squads back to regular work. In addition, five states have a new and peculiarly American technique for killing, lethal anesthesia injections, which could increase public acceptance of executions. Experts on capital punishment, both pro and con, agree that as many as ten to 15 inmates could be put to death this year, a total not reached since the early 1960s. "People on death rows are simply running out of appeals," says the Rev. Joe Ingle, a prison activist and death-penalty opponent. "I fear we are heading toward a slaughter."

For years, the capital-punishment debate has been sporadic and mainly intramural—professor vs. professor, lawyer vs. lawyer—as executions took place only once or twice annually at most. Says Florida's Governor Robert Graham, who signed Spenkelink's death warrant in 1979: "We haven't enforced the death penalty much, so we've been able to avoid all the responsibilities that go with that experience."

But now an old array of tough questions—practical, legal, moral, even metaphysical—is being examined. Is the death penalty an effective, much less a necessary, deterrent to murder? Is it fair? That is, does it fall equally on the wealthy white surgeon represented by Edward Bennett Williams and the indigent black with court-appointed (and possibly perfunctory) counsel? Most fundamental, is it civilized to take a life in the name of justice?

Fear, pure and simple, is behind the new advocacy of the death penalty. Between 1960 and 1973, the U.S. homicide rate doubled, from 4.7 murders per 100,000 people to 9.4. The rate has leveled off considerably and stands at 9.8 per 100,000 today. (Other countries' rates are, by U.S. standards, amazingly low: England, 1.1, and Japan, 1.0, are typical.) No more precipitous increases are expected this century: criminologists believe that the murder spree of the '60s and early '70s was mostly the doing of World War II baby-boom children passing through their crime-prone years of adolescence and young adulthood. As it happened, the number of young people and cheap, readily available handguns