America's cultural divide on the death penalty



NEW YORK, UNITED STATES Mar 08 2009

Roe Wilson sounds at peace with the fact that she has handled or
supervised 91 executions in the 20 years she has overseen capital
case appeals.

"I've seen what these defendants have done to people," said Wilson,
an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas -- the busiest
death penalty county in America's busiest death penalty state.

Several cases in particular come to mind for her, including a man
accused of killing his adoptive parents, two sisters and brother-in-
law. The victims were suffocated or fatally beaten with a crowbar,
then bound with tape and plastic ties and burned. He died proclaiming
his innocence.

"When crimes happen, what you read in the newspapers is so
antiseptic. They don't say what the bodies looked like," she said.

Wilson's views are not unusual, particularly in America's
conservative Southern states where the biblical view of an eye for an
eye rings true. Such states remain committed to capital punishment
despite signs that other parts of the US are moving away from it.

Countrywide, death sentences and executions have been on a steady
decline for more than a decade. Legislation being debated in several
states to abolish capital punishment is getting more attention than
in the past.

President Barack Obama has said he is in favor of executions only in
extreme cases, but has otherwise mostly avoided the issue and has no
direct sway over states' death penalty laws. But he could appoint
more liberal justices to federal courts who are less likely to impose
death sentences.

Observers caution that the death penalty is not likely to end soon in
a country where polls still show 60% of people support executions.
They point to the mostly conservative American South as the major
reason.

"What everybody needs to know is that this is a highly diverse
country, and that what happens in one or two or three states is not
an indicator of a national trend," said Richard Bonnie, a law
professor at the University of Virginia and an expert on capital
punishment.

"There is virtually no likelihood that in the foreseeable future that
southern states will abolish the death penalty," he added.

Of the 1 151 executions nationwide since the US Supreme court
reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the vast majority -- 951 --
occurred in the South, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty
Information Centre. Texas alone -- the home state of former president
George Bush -- had 431.

Eleven states out of the 36 that have it are considering abolishing
the death penalty, though one of the states with pending legislation
is Texas, and the Bill is not expected to get far. The remaining 10
have had a total of 30 executions since 1976. And two of those, New
Hampshire and Kansas, had no executions at all.

Death penalty opponents point to the fact some of these Bills have
been provoking more of a debate than in past years as a sign of
progress, an indication that minds are changing.

In part, recent death row exonerations prompted by improved methods
of testing physical evidence, including DNA samples, have planted
seeds of doubt. And changes to state laws also have made a
difference, as more states have been giving juries the option of
imposing life without parole rather than death.

Financial necessity also is a driving factor. The death penalty is an
expensive proposition -- trials often require extra lawyers for
appeals and higher security costs -- and cash-strapped states are
responding to the notion that it is cheaper to imprison people for
life. However once the recession recedes, so could the urge to
abolish capital punishment.

"They're getting debate, and that is highly unusual," said Richard
Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre.
But "this is not an indication that the death penalty is going to be
gone in two years. It's a ferment, not a revolution."

What will probably happen is that the cultural divide between the
regions will grow wider. In the past, close to 80% of executions have
occurred in the South, now the percentage is closer to 90, Dieter said.

"If it's being practiced just in one region it becomes more suspect,"
he said.

Wilson, the prosecutor in Harris County, Texas, argued that different
regions have different needs, and should not impose their views on
each other.

"If you live, say, in Vermont, their crime rate is exceedingly low
for violent crime ... it's easier to take the moral high road if it's
in the abstract," Wilson said.

Nonetheless, there are signs that the US is slowly moving away from
the ultimate punishment -- even in the South. Death sentences dropped
from 295 in 1993 to 111 in 2008 nationwide, according to the Death
Penalty Information Centre. Death sentences also have dropped in the
South.

"Things are definitely changing. It's changing here," said Richard
Rosen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and an opponent of capital punishment.

North Carolina, a Southern state, hasn't put an inmate to death in
more than two years and is not likely to do so soon, due to an
ongoing legal battle over whether doctors can be involved in lethal
injections.

"Change is slower in the South, but it is coming," Rosen said.

"We're on a different swing now. Though I've been around long enough
to realise the pendulum can swing the other way." - Sapa-AP

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the-death-penalty