Our Urge to Execute
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers OUR URGE TO EXECUTE ANGER AS A POLITICAL FACT Democracy is a wonderful thing. Ours may be indifferent to the nuances of public desire, but if the people want...
...It does not require much wit to see that a public in a mood to kill is angry indeed, and the United States is in the grip of precisely such a mood...
...People are angy about the high tide of murder in the United States—19,120 homicides last year, including 1557 in New York City alone—and furious about the slap-on-the-wrist inadequacy (as they see it) of murder's punishment...
...It is just such cases as this which have elicited the extraordinary and entirely genuine public anger fueling current efforts to bring back the death penalty...
...But you can get an unscientific measure of the public feeling from casual conversation...
...At one time Alan knew just about every prosecutor in New York State outside the city, and he shared their bleak disgust at their inability to do anything much to murderers beyond putting them away for a few years, at best, and that only with great difficulty, at great expense...
...Spinkellink is the closest to the wire, but there are a good many others crowding behind...
...People tell me," Schwarzschild says, " 'I don't care if it does any good or not...
...It is not capital punishment which is returning, so much as a kind of capital lottery...
...After a few months the boy's grandmother told the court he was too much for her to handle, so he returned to live with his family in Manhattan, and rejoined his old classmates...
...A properly defended case, Schwarzschild says, can be dragged out for five or six years, but after that the public will get its way...
...The 700-and-some people then under sentence of death all escaped...
...It seems to be pretty strong...
...He paid particular attention to the legal grounds of appeal, generally something of a niggling sort—an inadequate Miranda warning, say, or seizure of a piece of evidence (the bloody ice pick from beneath a car seat) without an adequate warrant...
...Finely honed ethical arguments against capital punishment only made him smile with bitter amusement...
...Time has about run out on the oldest cases...
...No one thinks the boy should have been executed, but they certainly feel something should have been done, more than the paltry nothing which was done...
...A couple of years ago one of her students, angry at being told to shut up, stabbed another student to death at a basketball game...
...When we speak of someone "getting away with murder," we do not intend to remark upon his slippery finesse or good luck, but to express our sense of injured justice...
...It explains the reckless drive for tax reduction behind Proposition 13, the rejection of government as a pack of spendthrift meddlesome bureaucratic time-servers, hostility toward the poor as a shiftless rabble of welfare cheats...
...This anger is one of the great political facts of the moment, and it may prove to be a long moment...
...Henry Schwarzschild, the head of the ACLU's capital punishment project, says he runs into it all over the country...
...This sonofabitch did it and that's what he deserves.' " But if feelings truly run so high, why have there been so few executions—only one (of Gary Gilmore in Utah on January 17, 1977) since June, 1967...
...Alan had a good memory—he knew an astonishing amount of poetry, could recite whole plays by Shakespeare—and his account of such crimes was always orderly, meticulous, and graphic...
...A capital lottery can be expected to have no deterrent effect at all...
...Clearly this is a case of grossly inadequate response to murder, and no one ought to be surprised that teachers and students in the school are pretty angry about it...
...He liked to cite the case of one tiny upstate community which actually had to float a bond issue to pay for a single murder prosecution, and then watched the killer walk in the end on a technicality...
...If they should succeed, there is no foretelling the result...
...The ingenuity of defense lawyers never ceased to impress him, nor their frequent success to amaze him...
...He brought a good deal of swagger with him, and the other students tend to back out of the way when he starts to bully...
...It's a kind of free-floating anger, perhaps the truest legacy of Vietnam and Watergate, settling here and there arbitrarily, with a kind of blind fury...
...it simply wants to get even, for a change...
...Two days after the murder he picked up his books at school...
...Commonweal: 744 This attitude has gotten to be pretty general...
...Well...
...What the people want, to put the case more precisely, are executions...
...Because of his age his case was handled by family court, which sentenced him to live with his grandmother in Queens...
...Under the statutes which survive the 1976 ruling and those enacted since, some 453 people—half of them black, five of them women—have been sentenced to death...
...They thoroughly distrust claims of post-murder "rehabilitation," and don't even much care if execution would really serve as a deterrent...
...He is not a "leader" or a "hero," exactly, but as a known killer he is a figure of some consequence...
...High on their list at the moment, right behind tax reduction, if the polls are to be believed, is the death penalty...
...There is nothing very strange in the public's desire to execute murderers...
...Henry Schwarzschild at the ACLU is not optimistic...
...If his lawyers fail to come up with a whole new approach, and if the State of Florida actually proceeds to execute him, then the death penalty may once again become a commonplace in American life...
...In 1972 the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was imposed too arbitrarily to be Constitutional...
...The evidence for capital punishment as a deterrent is pretty thin, even where it is inexorably and frequently imposed...
...The kind of murders, in short, one reads about at least once a week, if one reads about murders at all...
...THOMAS POWERS 24 November 1978: 745...
...The exact pitch of this public desire is hard to gauge...
...They are impatient, even rudely short, with all arguments suggesting that murderers are themselves victims of society, childhood trauma, ungovernable impulses of medical origin, etc...
...They are not reassured by the observation that murder in this country consists largely of the poor killing the poor, the black the black, and the young the young...
...Anger is a natural response to injury, and murder is the ultimate injury...
...Within a year, perhaps less, the lights will begin to dim in the prisons again after a ten-year interlude...
...The courts have made it clear they are not against executions on principle, and are perfectly willing to step out of the way once the details have been worked out in an orderly manner...
...The one closest to actual execution is a young man named John Spinkellink, convicted of murdering a traveling companion while he slept in a motel bed in Tallahassee, Florida, in February, 1973...
...Ours may be indifferent to the nuances of public desire, but if the people want something enough, badly enough, for long enough, you can be pretty sure they are eventually going to get it...
...His way of arguing the issue of capital punishment was to describe particular murders in detail, especially ones of the more heinous sort, in which some dim, sneaking, pimpled fellow had murdered a father of four with an ice pick, or a child by burying her alive, or a woman by strangling her with panty hose, and then burning down the house to hide the evidence, including an infant sleeping upstairs...
...My old friend Alan Luke, now dead, used to speak of executions as "taking out the garbage.'' He worked for a firm of law printers and over the years read a good many appeals in homicide cases...
...The people do not speak with a crystal voice, except at the ballot box, and there questions tend to be reduced to the fundamentals of this or that, yes or no...
...The struggle is really quite titanic, in its legal way, with huge numbers of lawyers engaged at vast expense on both sides...
...A new round of legis-" lation resulted in what are called guided discretion statutes providing for a kind of two-part trial in which a jury decides, first, if the accused is guilty, and second, what penalty to impose in light of aggravating or mitigating circumstances...
...But that is not really what the public is after...
...It is anger which explains the desire for executions, anger pure and simple, and anger alone...
...The short answer seems to be that the mills of the law grind exceedingly slow...
...Those following the case say Spinkellink has pretty well exhausted his legal remedies and will have his back against the wall by next April...
...State legislatures quickly re-ponded by passing new laws, many of them imposing mandatory death sentences, but in July, 1976, the Supreme Court ruled mandatory sentences unconstitutional as well...
...There are a great many things one might say about this, and doubtless all of them will be, but there is one point which strikes me as preeminent...
...We're in a sorry state," he would say, "when we can't clean up our own mess...
...not the death penalty, exactly, since 32 states already have statutes providing death as a penalty for certain crimes...
...No one suggests that the 19,000 annual homicides in the country are going to be matched by 19,000 executions, or anything like that number...
...A good guess would be a hundredth of that number— 190 executions a year—and perhaps not even so many as that...
...At the moment the anger is all turned inward, despite the best efforts of some figures in Washington to rechannel it outward, against Russia...
...My wife teaches junior high school on the lower East Side of Manhattan...
Vol. 105 • November 1978 • No. 23
