With the death of Robert Alton Harris in California's gas chamber on April 21, the long, emotional debate over the death penalty in this country has entered an unfortunate new era.
Gone, for example, is the perception that capital punishment is a Southern phenomenon. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976, 20 states have conducted executions. But in the first four months of this year, Wyoming, Delaware, Arizona, and now California did so for the first time in a quarter century, nearly doubling the number of non-Southern states that have carried out a death sentence since 1976.
"Many people saw the death penalty as rooted in the South and tied to Southern law and race control," says Diann Rust-Tierney of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Now it is moving to the North and other states."
Gone, too, is the misperception that the courts will assure that every legal argument and appeal will be heard before an execution is carried out. In the Harris case, the Supreme Court overturned four appeals from a federal appellate court in a matter of hours before declaring that such appeals "were abusive" and ordering the execution to go forward.
"No further stays shall be entered by the federal courts," the justices ruled in a 7-2 vote that was quickly criticized by legal scholars as unconstitutional and abusive in its own right.
Yet there is one strong argument the courts did not hear: the moral case against the death penalty. Lost among the nuances of the endless legal petitions that made their way through the courts is the contention that, from a moral point of view, killing another person--especially when done by the state--is wrong.
Ironically, the belief in the immorality of killing is at the basis of arguments in favor of capital punishment as well. Robert Alton Harris, for example, was condemned for killing two teen-age boys in San Diego 14 years ago. The murders were so heinous, the courts said, that Harris must die as retribution.
Not even his lawyers sought to downplay the severity of Harris' crimes. But his death would not resurrect the boys he killed. Nor would it any more protect society than would a sentence of life imprisonment. Nor, finally, would it demonstrate that murder is unacceptable in a civilized society.
Lawyers pushed appeals on Harris' behalf to the end, winning an unprecedented four stays of execution beginning less than five hours before their client was scheduled to die. The final stay was issued as Harris sat strapped to a chair in the sealed gas chamber watching the vats beneath him fill with acid. While the reprieve allowed Harris to become the first person ever to emerge from California's gas chamber alive, it proved temporary. Two hours later, the Supreme Court ordered the federal courts to stop impeding the execution.
Harris' execution drew immediate criticism from around the world. In France, for example, the nation's leading newspaper, Le Monde, published a scathing front-page editorial denouncing Harris' death. Two leading British dailies followed suit, headlining one piece "Auschwitz in California" in reference to Harris' death by cyanide gas.
California's last execution was the subject of considerable controversy. In 1967, Aaron Mitchell was put to death after then-Gov. Ronald Reagan blew off a clemency hearing to attend the Academy Awards presentation. Reagan was so severely criticized for his indifference that, eight weeks later, he commuted the sentence of convicted killer Calvin Thomas without bothering to meet with Thomas' lawyer.
EXECUTIONS CARRY the explicit and mistaken message that killing, in some cases, is OK; revenge, under the cloak of authority, is permissible. Some lives, the state has determined, are more valuable than others.
This is the philosophy that underlies the death penalty. And it is the same philosophy that drives death squads in Central America, religious zealots in the Middle East, and gang murders in our inner cities. But while society is rightly outraged by revenge-driven gang killings, it continues to support the state's right to seek retribution by putting its citizens to death.
The moral argument is by no means the only one against the death penalty, however. Dozens of studies have shown that capital punishment does nothing to deter crime.
Moreover, application of the death penalty is cruelly unfair, operating more like a lottery than a system of justice: Although approximately 4,000 people are convicted of murder in the United States each year, just 250 are sentenced to death--and nearly half of those sentences are set aside by appeal. According to Ian Martin, secretary general of Amnesty International, local politics, money, and the location of a crime often play a more decisive role in sending a defendant to death than do the circumstances of the crime itself.
RACE HAS PROVEN to be a major factor in determining who dies and who is sentenced instead to life in prison. In Texas, blacks who kill whites are six times more likely to receive a death sentence than are those whose victims were black. In Florida, blacks who kill whites are 40 times more likely to end up on death row than are whites who kill blacks.
Despite all that, support for capital punishment is at an all-time high. A Los Angeles Times poll in the wake of the Harris execution showed that just 18 percent of Californians were opposed to the death penalty. Nationwide, polls show as many as 90 percent of those surveyed are in favor of capital punishment.
But perhaps most ominous of all was the Times' poll result that showed two-thirds of the respondents believe several executions a year would "be a good thing for society."
Yet as the ritualized killing of prisoners grows more common, we can only hope that society will finally reject capital punishment as morally reprehensible.
"People will find reasons to oppose the death penalty," says Magdaleno Rose-Avila, the Western regional director for Amnesty International. "People...in the country at large will one day see this as a period in history they will not want to be involved with."
In some unexpected places, the transformation has already begun. As a nondescript white Chevy van transported the lifeless body of Robert Alton Harris past the gates of San Quentin last April, a group of prison guards lit cigars in mock celebration.
Behind the walls four other guards huddled together silently. And they cried.
Kevin Baxter was copy editor of the Los Angeles Times when this article appeared.
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