Teddy Kennedy on Death Row
Fowler, Jack
TEDDY KENNEDY ON DEATH ROW Washington W hile in California politicians are making support for capital punishment the campaign issue of 1990, in our nation's capital Ted Kennedy and his allies are...
...To claim anything less would detract from the act's political allure of letting senators have it both ways: opposition to racism and support for the death penalty in some form...
...Attorney General Richard Thornburgh is even tougher on this "ill-considered and misnamed" proposal, saying it imposes such "unrealistic burdens of proof" on prosecutors that it "would likely result in the invalidation of every capital sentence now in effect...
...The bill purports only to remove racial bias from capital sentencing, leaving death penalty laws still operable...
...As its code name suggests, the Racial Justice Act is premised on the belief that a greater proportion of convicted black murderers receive death sentences than do white killers, that a smaller percentage of convicted killers generally are executed for murdering blacks than for killing whites, and that court systems are biased against minorities...
...Not so, say twenty-three state attorneys general (ten of them Democrats), who in a joint letter of March 12 charge that the Racial Justice Act "is designed to do nothing less than end the death penalty in this country...
...At this point there's no talk of a House vote on the bill, so it's not likely the act will become law any time soon...
...If this impossible-to-meet quota scheme becomes law, will any murderer ever again face a death sentence...
...Now according to the act, such figures would constitute a "prima facie showing of a racially discriminatory pattern," and so it decrees that our convict "shall not be put to death...
...TEDDY KENNEDY ON DEATH ROW Washington W hile in California politicians are making support for capital punishment the campaign issue of 1990, in our nation's capital Ted Kennedy and his allies are busy pushing a bill that would suppress the death penalty...
...The defendant is specifically not required to prove that his own trial and sentencing were influenced by discrimination...
...A black on death row finds, say, that five percent of blacks "arrested for, charged with, or convicted of" capital crimes are executed, as opposed to two percent of whites who fit that category...
...Their pitch continues to be that the act won't endanger the death penalty...
...and that three percent of those convicted of killing blacks are executed, while seven percent of white victims' murderers receive a death sentence...
...But it could still win a symbolic vote on the Senate floor, unless conservative senators—risking media wrath for opposing "racial justice"—make good on rumored plans to attack the act as a ruse to scuttle capital punishment nationwide...
...Under the act, a convicted murderer can save his life by showing that executions are imposed disproportionately (1) upon "persons of one race than upon persons of another," or (2) as "punishment for crimes against persons of one race than . . . against persons of another race...
...This accounts for the presence of capital punishment supporters like Arlen Specter, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Robert Packwood as co-sponsors of the measure...
...Thornburgh also argues that blacks—who are nearly "one-half of all victims of murders"—will be hardest hit because the proposal "would ensure that the death penalty is not available to punish such victims' murderers...
...Jack Fowler (Mr...
...Given the way conservatives have caved in to previous liberal efforts at intimidation-by-billtitle," a Senate staffer says, recalling such gems as the Civil Rights Restoration Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, "just putting up a fight would be a victory of sorts...
...Thornburgh's criticisms have not deterred the NAACP and other liberal lobbies from giving strong backing to the measure...
...To resolve these problems the bill would bar executions where there is a "racially discriminatory pattern" in capital sentencing and prosecuting...
...But if critics are correct, the bill, by mandating that such sentencing can occur only if it conforms to racial quotas, will make these laws unworkable...
...Here's how the act would work...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990...
...If this sounds like the coming of affirmative action to death row, that's the point...
...Sometime after May 20, the Senate is expected to take up a Democratic crime package that includes Kennedy's so-called Racial Justice Act...
...Why...
...Fowler is a reporter in National Review's Washington bureau...
...Because his execution would "further" that "pattern...
Vol. 23 • June 1990 • No. 6
