The exposure that these "flaws" and "errors"--in reality an exposure of the way the "justice" system really works--helped railroad thousands of working people to death row has created political problems for the U.S. rulers. They are seeking ways to stave off more blows to their prerogatives to use state-sanctioned murder.

The debate has been stoked by recent developments, such as protests around the scheduled execution of Gary Graham, the moratorium on the death penalty imposed by the governor of Illinois, the vote to ban capital punishment by the state legislature in New Hampshire, and a recent study stating that two-thirds of all convictions involving the death penalty are overturned on appeal because of misconduct by government authorities.

"Voices from across the political spectrum have begun to question whether those on death row received fair trials," wrote Brooke Masters in the June 12 Washington Post. "Although executions have reached record numbers, public support is at a 19-year low," Masters added.

"Can you honestly say that you're going to get equal justice under the law when, if you've got the money, you're going to get away with it?" declared New Hampshire state representative Anthony DiFruscia during a vote to ban capital punishment. "There are no millionaires on death row," he said. New Hampshire legislators passed a bill May 18 ending the death penalty, which was later vetoed by the state's Democratic governor, Jeanne Shaheen.

DiFruscia's comments reflect how the anti-working-class and racist character of the death penalty is becoming more exposed in the media. In the June 11 New York Times, an article headlined "Racial Bias Found in Six More Capital Cases," stated how Texas attorney general John Cornyn is seeking the overturn of the death row sentences of six inmates. Their death sentences were based on testimony from clinical psychologist Walter Quijano, who served as an "expert witness" for prosecutors across Texas in sentencing hearings.

Cornyn's announcement came less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of Victor Saldano, a native of Argentina. Quijano recommended the death penalty for Saldano to a Texas court based on his assertion that Latinos are prone to violence.  
 
Abuse of death row inmates
A report released in mid-June, conducted by a team of lawyers and criminologists at Columbia University, stated that in all capital cases from 1973, when the death penalty was reinstated, until 1995 some 75 percent of the people whose death sentences were set aside on appeal were given lesser sentences and 7 percent were found not guilty. The study noted "flaws" in the judicial process such as prejudicial error, coerced misconduct by cops, suppression of evidence by prosecutors, coerced confessions, planting snitches in jails to spy on conversations between defendants and their lawyers, faulty instructions given to juries, and bad legal counsel.

Inmates awaiting execution are subject to abuse by prison guards. Last year Florida death row inmate Frank Valdez was beaten to death by prison guards armed with stun guns. Another Florida inmate, Bernie Demps, who was killed June 7 this year, said his executioners strapped him to a gurney for 33 minutes while they sliced into his body and struggled to find a vein to inject lethal chemicals. "They butchered me," Demps said in the death chamber before he died. "I was in a lot of pain. They cut me in the groin; they cut me in the leg. I was bleeding profusely."

The debate over capital punishment among bourgeois political figures has provoked a bipartisan push for legislative "safeguards" to ensure "fairness and accuracy" when the death penalty is meted out. "A significant number of people sentenced to death in America in the late 20th century have been absolutely, undeniably innocent," declared, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, who is cosponsoring the Innocence Protection Act, along with three Republican senators. The measure would require state governments to make DNA testing available to all inmates, provide adequate counsel in capital cases, and preserve biological evidence that can be used in appeals after a person is convicted.  
 
Moratorium on the death penalty
Gov. George Ryan of Illinois acknowledged the state's "shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row" when he declared a moratorium on executions there. Ryan, an advocate of the death penalty, halted executions in the state after 13 men sent to death row were exonerated by new evidence. Since the death penalty was brought back to Illinois 12 inmates have been executed.

Ryan has appointed a commission to "fix" problems with the death penalty, but said he would not resume executions until the commission can give him "a 100 percent guarantee" against mistaken convictions. Some 12 states have already had legislation introduced to halt executions this year.

More than a third of the executions in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated have been in Texas. In Harris County alone, which includes the city of Houston, 62 people have been put to death, making it the jurisdiction with the third highest number of executions in the country. Only the state of Texas itself and Virginia have executed more human beings.

Liberal figures among ruling-class circles have harangued Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush for presiding over 134 executions--far more than any other state--during his five years as governor of Texas. For the first time in five years, Governor Bush granted a 30-day reprieve on June 1 for Ricky Nolen McGinn, so that DNA testing can be performed to determine more definitively McGinn's guilt on a rape charge.

The Associated Press reported that investigators from the Chicago Tribune found that since Bush became governor in 1995, defense attorneys presented only one witness or no evidence during the trials' sentencing phase for 40 of the 134 inmates executed. Defendants in about one-third of Texas's capital cases were represented at their trial or initial appeal by a lawyer who had been, or later was, disbarred, suspended, or otherwise sanctioned.

It was a multipart series in the Chicago Times exposing some of the most blatant abuses carried out by prosecutors, cops, and the courts in capital cases that added to the pressures forcing Ryan to impose the moratorium on the death penalty. Some of the abuses included police torture to obtain confessions.

Vice president Albert Gore, Democratic candidate for president, reaffirmed his support for legalized murder in a June 13 interview with the New York Times. Gore had been mum about the death penalty controversy engulfing his rival, George W. Bush. His support for capital punishment was viewed as a political asset in 1992 when William Clinton chose him as his running mate.

That was the year when soon-to-be president William Clinton flew into Arkansas after campaigning in New Hampshire to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally disabled man. Clinton greased the skids for the execution process as he signed into law the reactionary Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996. One of the provisions in the measure puts a one-year time limit on appeals by death row inmates to federal courts after exhausting their appeals in state courts. Since state-sponsored killings were restarted, more than 70 percent of the 646 executions in the United States have been during the eight years of the Clinton administration.

The Supreme Court struck down all existing death penalty statutes in 1972, on the heels of the massive struggles of Blacks for civil rights and in the midst of the mass movement against the Vietnam War. Almost immediately state governments began passing death penalty laws to get around the court's reinterpretation of the Eighth Amendment, which bars "cruel and unusual punishment." On July 2, 1976, the Court declared that capital punishment does not violate the Constitution after all. The next year Gary Gilmore was put to death by a firing squad, dealing a setback to the long struggle to end this barbaric form of punishment.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home