The Death Penalty: An Eye for an Eye

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Civil Liberties Union—and, more ineffably, as an extension of two centuries of penal reform (see box). But most important, during the decade and a half after the war, the U.S. homicide rate stayed fairly constant and unalarming, never rising above 6.4 per 100,000 (in 1946). Year after year, there were roughly 8,000 killings (a third of the 1981 total), seemingly as predictable and steady as deaths from accidental drownings (5,000 a year) or falls (19,000). Americans felt unthreatened. They could afford the emotional luxury of indulging their instincts for reason. During 1964 and 1965, three states (Oregon, Iowa and West Virginia) abolished capital punishment, and Vermont narrowed its applicability mainly to those who murdered policemen or prison guards.

But in most places the retreat from capital punishment was not a formal, statutory change. At any one time no more than a third of the states have been without a death-penalty provision. It seems that Americans want it both ways, retaining the right to exterminate miscreants, as well as having the option not to exercise that awful power. It is easy and sometimes appealing to talk tough and demand mercilessness in the abstract. But to really "fry the bastards"? How many? Which ones? "What a person says on a public opinion poll," observes Thomas Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, "and what they'll say on a jury, might well be two different things."

The ambivalence seemed apparent in last November's elections, when capital punishment was a potent political issue but not a decisive one. Like New York, Massachusetts this month inaugurated a Governor opposed to the death penalty. But just three weeks earlier, the legislature in Boston had once again legalized executions. Even increasingly hard-line voters in California chose an attorney general who disapproves of capital punishment.

The uneasiness with capital punishment has led this nation of tinkerers to an odd inventiveness. Elsewhere in the world where executions are still regularly carried out—among industrialized nations, only Japan, South Africa and the Soviet Union—the bullet and the noose are used exclusively. Yet in the U.S., only half a dozen states call for old-fashioned firing squads or hangings. The electric chair killed quickly and, it was thought, painlessly. It seemed, in any case, up to date, civilized. (This progressive image is somewhat at odds with the testimony of Willie Francis, 17, who survived a sublethal shock by Louisiana's portable apparatus in 1946. Francis said the experience was in all "plumb miserable." His mouth tasted "like cold peanut butter," and he saw "little blue and pink and green speckles." Added Francis: "I felt a burning in my head and my left leg, and I jumped against the straps." A year later, back in the chair, he was successfully executed.)

The electric chair caught on slowly in the U.S. and not at all abroad. During the 1920s and '30s, the cyanide-gas chamber became state-of-the-American-art. It too was popular only in the U.S. Now there are lethal injections, which are seen as still more "humane." This latest technical refinement, which the European press finds chilling and fascinating, seems sure to remain strictly a U.S. practice. Sums up Notre Dame Theology Professor