Death penalty has slim effect on murder rate
By David Walker
LONDON: The gun and tobacco lobbies are fighting tough rearguard actions, hoping for a Republican victory, but the American presidential campaign has also just had an oddly liberal moment.
On the litmus issue of capital punishment, Pat Robertson, the television evangelist, joined the American Civil Liberties Union in calling for a moratorium -- no more deaths until the system deals more fairly with poor and black defendants who cannot afford lawyers.
It may be a fleeting moment but it is worth savoring. The rightwing Cato Institute, conservative columnists (George Will) and Republican governors have expressed doubts about the death penalty in its present form.
There are bills before the Senate to guarantee defendants in murder cases access to "competent" legal advice, give prisoners a right to DNA testing and suspend executions pending a presidential review.
A realist would quickly say: don't get carried away. Capital punishment is an American totem; the vast majority of successful American homicide prosecutions lead only to a jail sentence. Since the mid-1960s, there has only been one execution for every 1,600 murders (0.06 percent).
On capital punishment people may be slightly more relaxed because -- Columbine school and Washington zoo aside -- the United States is a safer place than it has been for a while.
The murder rate rose, as if unstoppably, to peak as Jimmy Carter left office at 10.2 homicides per 100,000 people per year; after a fall it peaked again during the Bush presidency at 9.8 per 100,000.
During the Clinton years it has fallen, to 6.3 per 100,000 by 1998. It is not just murder, either. The FBI's generic crime index dropped during the 1990s. Violent crime has been falling since 1994 and offenses against property are on a 20-year downward path.
The reasons are a complicated compound of demography, penal policy, prosperity and job opportunities. In the UK crime has been related to the size of the age group most likely to offend -- males in their teens and early 20s.
But in the United States, that offending age group has recently grown in absolute numbers. A growing proportion of it is employed and a growing proportion is banged up. The U.S. prison population was 182,000 when Carter left office; at the start of Clinton's second term it was more than 510,000. The convicted population locked up, on parole or on probation rose from 1.8 million to 5.5 million.
Governor Bill Clinton famously flew back to Arkansas when he first ran for the presidency to preside over an execution. It confirmed his belief that the state must kill to exact justice. His attorney general, Janet Reno, focuses on deterrence. She says she has yet to find any evidence that the death penalty stops crime.
It is that empirical gap, plus qualms about legal procedure, that may explain the recent upsurge of domestic doubts. It is not foreign pressure from Italy, Germany and Spain nor the appearance of the United States at the head of international execution league tables alongside such paragons as China, Iran, Egypt, Belarus and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The domestic picture is, typically, far from uniform. The state of Michigan claims to be the first English-speaking jurisdiction in the world to abolish the death penalty -- in 1846.
Capital punishment does not exist in Alaska, Hawaii, Minnesota, Vermont or Iowa. The chart shows the murder rate in those states which do not execute compared with death-penalty neighbors.
Legal killing is very much part of the southern way of life. Indeed it was a would-be Georgia execution that led to the supreme court decision in 1972 that capital punishment was unconstitutional. The ruling was overturned four years later and executions resumed in 1979.
Since then, some 628 people have been executed. Because procedure is protracted, convicted prisoners languish and "death row" (current population some 3,600) grows in size.
A problem perceived even by Pat Robertson is death row's ethnic imbalance. Take California: of the 561 people awaiting execution at the start of this year, 201 were black and 105 Latino against the 228 classified as white. That is not just due to different offending rates -- it has to do with judicial procedure and legal representation.
The wider question remains effectiveness. Prison "works" if you lock up enough potential or previous offenders. Execution does not seem to have an educative effect.
More murders were committed during the years when capital punishment had been ruled illegal -- which suggests killing is not directly related to expectation of punishment.
Critics point out differences in criminality between states which do and states which don't. If capital punishment deterred, Texas should be a lot safer because it executes more.
Comparatively speaking it is not. In Oklahoma murder rates did not fall after executions were reintroduced. The deep south accounts for 80 percent of executions. The north-east, which has less than 1 percent of all executions, has the lowest murder rate.
But all that may say is that specific states have identifiable "criminal cultures" to do with police and court procedure, public attitudes and access to firearms.
Perhaps the very identity of states such as Texas and Arkansas is bound up with their official approval of executions and love of weaponry; the fate of capital punishment, as of gun control in New York and California, will be much more a touchstone of potential policy changes.
Al Gore is the abolitionists' best hope (there are 100 or so inmates of death row in his home state of Tennessee), but to win the White House in November he has to win in Pennsylvania and probably Florida, states with active death policies.
Despite Pat Robertson, attitudes in the eye-for-an-eye belt show few signs of change. Take Bill Clinton's Arkansas. On Tuesday evening this week Christina Marie Riggs was executed after being convicted in 1998 of the murder of her two young children; she then attempted suicide. Her pathetic state of mind was shown at her trial when she asked the jury to sentence her to death.
-- Guardian News Service