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In Alabama, 69% of those executed since 1976 were black. In Georgia the figure is 55%. Even though blacks are more likely than whites to be the victim of homicide, the overwhelming majority of capital cases involve crimes committed against people who are white. The disparity was attacked in a landmark 1987 case, McClesky v. Kemp. Warren McClesky, a black man convicted of killing a white police officer in Georgia, based his appeal on a study that showed killers of white people were four times as likely to get the death penalty as killers of nonwhites. That wasn't enough to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court, which found in a 5-to-4 vote that the statistical disparity didn't prove that McClesky had been sentenced to death because of skin color. McClesky's charge was supported by a 1990 report by the General Accounting Office, which found that blacks who kill whites are sentenced to death at a far higher rate than whites who kill blacks.
Bill Clinton, who during his 1992 presidential campaign refused to use his power as Governor to stop the execution of a brain-damaged black convict in Arkansas, told TIME in an interview last week that he is comfortable with the way the death penalty is applied in America. Revisiting the question of discriminatory sentencing as part of the race-relations initiative he plans to unveil this week, he said, "would not be a fruitful line of inquiry. The Supreme Court has made a decision there, [and] overwhelming majorities of all racial groups favor capital punishment."
Like the President, most Americans just aren't sweating the fine points of the capital-punishment debate. While executions are being abolished in most parts of the planet--exceptions include Iran, Iraq, China, Yemen and some former Soviet states--Americans seem to want more of them, with fewer appeals and delays. Thanks to Congress and the courts, they're getting their wish--especially in the "Death Belt" states of Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama, which together account for 78% of the executions America has seen since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
While states in New England and the Northern Midwest and Pacific Northwest either forbid capital punishment or rarely use the laws on their books, in the South putting people to death has become a part of life. That is especially true in Texas, which has had 127 executions since 1976, almost a third of the national total. Today 448 people wait on death row in Texas. "If they keep going at the rate they're going," says Stephen Bright, "it won't be long before Texas will have executed more people than all the rest of the states put together. They execute so many people that nobody pays any attention at all."
Every year about 300 people receive the death sentence in this country and about 35 leave death row--usually with the aid of electricity or an intravenous drip. Most of the arrivals and all the departures since 1976 have been state cases. If McVeigh gets the death penalty, he will be only the 13th federal prisoner sent to death row since 1976. None of the others have yet been executed, a reminder that those aching for McVeigh's death had better stay patient.