CAPITAL PUNISHMENT-OR SUICIDE?
Spear, Lois
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM NORTH CAROLINA C PITHL PUNISH IENT--OD SUICIDE? Once again Death Row in Raleigh's Central Prison has residents. James Calvin Jones, 35, and Daniel R. Webster,...
...Augustine College in Raleigh...
...During his trial, Webster took the stand and taunted the jury saying, "If I'm not given the death sentence, you are a disgrace to the state of North Carolina...
...On another day when he felt the trial was taking too long, Webster interrupted the proceedings by jumping to his feet and shouting, "I'm spending more time out of this courtroom than in it...
...In the second hearing, the jury may consider selected aggravating circumstances and an unlimited array of mitigating circumstances before deciding between execution or a long prison term...
...Webster, the second man on death row, has been in and out of jail since 1948, chiefly on breaking and entering charges...
...Lawyers in the case represent conflicting philosophies on capital punishment and the social backgrounds which tend to produce them...
...Coalition Against the Death Penalty as it seeks to hinder implementation of the new statute...
...Britt, who successfully prosecuted the state's case against Jones, was responsible, under North Carolina's earlier death penalty legislation, for legal cases that sent 20 defendants to death row...
...Loeklear, an opponent of capital punishment, is a graduate of North Carolina Central University in Durham, a state-funded, predominately black institution that has received considerable criticism because of the number of its graduates who fail to pass the legal certification examination...
...I'll be dead of old age before this trial is over with, at the rate you are going...
...Though death penalty opponents will try every means to get their message across to the state's population, the Webster case points up the most persuasive argument they can use: In states with death penalty legislation, mentally disturbed people may be tempted to commit murder to fulfill their own death wishes...
...The theory linking capital punishment with suicidal inclinations was documented in a 1968 survey finding that, in states with death penalty laws, there was a ratio of .58 first degree murders in a population of 100,000 compared with a .21 per 100,000 population in states without such legislation...
...The new legislation is similar to enactments by Florida and Georgia...
...Composed largely of church groups such as the Council of Churches, the American Friends Service Committee, and the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, the organization also includes the N.C...
...Judging by popular support of capital punishment and the comfortable margins with which the state legislature passed the enactment, the Coalition will have a difficult year ahead...
...The theory is an old one...
...No doubt the above information will be circulated as the major strategy of the N.C...
...The jury must decide, not only on the guilt or innocence of the defendant, but also on what the punishment should be...
...Louis Jolyon West, head of the department of Psychiatry at University of California at Los Angeles, and Dr...
...Association of Black LawyersBand from inmates, the N.C...
...Bernard L. Diamond, psychiatrist at the Berkeley Campus, consider state death penalty statutes comparable to "contracts," guaranteeing to anyone who wants to commit suicide but who hasn't the nerve to go through with it, that the state will step in and perform the suicide for him...
...Political Prisoners Committee...
...Jones, a Lumbee Indian from Robeson County, was convicted of armed robbery in 1967...
...25 November 1977:742...
...The state has a small group of death penalty opponents who have joined together in a loose confederation, the N.C...
...James Calvin Jones, 35, and Daniel R. Webster, 51, are the first two men to receive the death penalty under the state's new legislation which became effective on June 1 of this year...
...Coalition Against the Death Penalty...
...Execution date for Jones is set for January 20, 1978, but state law provides for automatic appeal...
...Though both of the state's Catholic dioceses have joined the Council of Churches, no Catholic organization has as yet allowed its name to be added to the Coalition's masthead...
...A 1767 Danish law provides that capital punishment not be ordered for "melancholy and other dismal persons" who commit murder "for the exclusive purpose of losing their lives...
...While out on pass after being returned to prison for parole violation, according to District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt, Jones killed another Indian, Jimmy Locklear, 68, by shooting him in the back with a 22caliber rifle...
...He (Webster) read everything he could get his hands on about it and was mean as the devil after that," Beauchamps said...
...Jones's defense attorney, state representative Horace Locldear (no relation to the victim), is the first American Indian admitted to the N.C...
...The state's capital punishment statute that put Jones and Webster on death row replaces an earlier one that had 122 people in Central Prison's maximum security unit at the time when the law was overturned by the July, 1976 Supreme Court decision...
...According to Webster's father-in-law, Major Beauchamps, the defendant was fascinated with the case of Gary Gilmore, the Utah man executed earlier this year...
...Hard Times Prison Project and N.C...
...LOIS SPEAR (Sister Lois Spear, O.P., teaches in the History Department o] St...
...He was convicted of murdering his wife as she prepared the evening meal...
Vol. 104 • November 1977 • No. 24
