McVeigh a poser for U.S. abolitionists

By Alexander Chancellor

LONDON: Sadly, George Bush has uttered fewer malapropisms -- or what Ronald Reagan used to call "misspeaks" -- since he became president of the United States in January, but there was an exceptionally good one a few weeks ago when he said, "We understand how unfair the death penalty is." There was an intake of breath at this statement from the Lord High Executioner of Texas, who, as governor of the state for five years, broke all records for U.S. governors by sending 112 murderers to their deaths.

But he never intended to criticize the death penalty, which he has always insisted is completely fair. He meant to say "the death tax" (inheritance tax), and he quickly corrected himself.

Since Bush has been at the White House, things have begun to look up a bit in Texas. Stung by criticism of the state's merciless law-and-order regime under Bush, its legislature has been pushing forward various measures to try at least to prevent innocent people being executed.

It has already passed a new law providing access to DNA testing for criminal defendants, and is on the point of passing two others that the president scuppered when he was governor -- one to ban the execution of the mentally impaired, and the other to provide a decent legal defense for the indigent, who are often represented in court by idle and incompetent lawyers.

This is happening against a national background that has been offering hope to campaigners against the death penalty over the past few years. Public opinion polls show that backing for it in the United States has slipped from a high of 80 percent in 1994 to 66 percent this year. Support was at its lowest last century in 1966, in the heyday of American liberalism, when it dropped to 42 percent. Then it crept up throughout the 1970s and 1980s in response to higher murder rates and a more conservative mood. But growing doubts, not so much about the principle of capital punishment as about the fairness of a judicial system that has been proved to convict the innocent, sapped support again in the second half of the 1990s.

Then along came Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to die for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people were killed -- the worst ever terrorist act committed against Americans on American soil. His case appeared to buck the trend. One opinion poll last month showed that 22 percent of the people who opposed the death penalty still wanted McVeigh to die. Another poll showed that 75 percent favored his execution, whereas only 66 percent supported capital punishment in principle. McVeigh brought out a thirst for revenge in thousands of normally merciful people, though there were, in fact, several among the relatives of his victims who thought he shouldn't die.

McVeigh was not someone to arouse compassion. He was clinically sane, and Gore Vidal (with whom he corresponded and whom he invited to witness his death by lethal injection) found him very intelligent. He was completely unrepentant. And he was part of an underground network of white supremacist guerrillas, two of whose ringleaders (according to one British newspaper last week) were secret cross-dressers. Despite the decoration he received for army service in the Gulf War, it was impossible not to detest him. As the New Yorker magazine said, opponents of the death penalty found him a hard case.

So what of the future? There is fear among the abolitionists that McVeigh may have set back their cause, but probably he won't have. Growing reservations about the death penalty are linked to broad social trends, including a poll finding last month that, while the public considers deterrence the primary justification for it, a majority does not actually believe that it lowers the murder rate. And after 89 people under sentence of death were exonerated and released in 1999, Illinois declared a moratorium on executions, and several other states have been considering doing the same.

In Britain, those of us who oppose the death penalty should count ourselves lucky. Public support for it here, at 68 percent, is slightly higher even than in the United States. But Parliament, having abolished capital punishment, is most unlikely ever to restore it, especially as abolition is a de facto condition of membership of the EU.

In the United States, they will doubtless continue to apply it for the foreseeable future. One reason is that America has 50 state legislatures with the right to decide for themselves on the matter. But there is a good chance that, even in the United States, the death penalty may soon come to be applied only to the seriously guilty, such as Timothy McVeigh.

-- Guardian News Service