The Juice Ain't No Use
DeParle, Jason
The Juice Ain't No Use Why the death penalty won't work in D. C. by Jason DeParle The record-setting murder rate that has gained Washington top network billing has many city residents nervous,...
...they can just turn on the nightly news...
...I frequently walk home late—past midnight—though lately I've been doing so less often and with greater unease...
...Fraternal Order of Police, and he isn't confining his campaign to late-night radio...
...Six months later, he was shot again in an attack that killed a close friend as they sat in a car...
...After all, there have already been more than 130 murders in the District this year, and about half of them were drug-related—many "execution-style...
...The bars were shutting down for the night a few months ago when my walk home took me past two speeding automobiles, with someone leaning out of the second and firing a gun at the first...
...Murchison must have known it was coming...
...The F.O.P...
...What is clear, however, is that record numbers of people are stealing and dealing drugs, even though the threat of death has never been greater...
...By contrast, we've had only 107 executions in all of the United States during the past 20 years...
...Little hangmen Not only is the District's privately operated death penalty more prolific than the run-of-the-mill, legislated kind, it's also more swift and sure...
...Supplementing the illegal executions with legal ones might make some of us feel better, but it's not likely to make my walk home any safer...
...The Juice Ain't No Use Why the death penalty won't work in D. C. by Jason DeParle The record-setting murder rate that has gained Washington top network billing has many city residents nervous, and I'm one of them...
...Oddly enough, though, for all its dispatch, ruthlessness, and visibility, D.C: s privatized death penalty doesn't seem to be acting as much of a deterrent...
...Maybe they think they'll die and don't particularly care...
...No lengthy appeals...
...Vendors sold little hangmen, and it was quite a spectacle...
...But] it will deter, I am convinced that it will deter, people who kill because of an assessment of human life versus profits in illegal activities" Criminals, Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...This, after all, is what Hankins and others say they want: "During some of the 19th century here, public executions and hangings were indeed well-attended," Hankins said...
...For the past two years, according to Sari Horwitz of The Washington Post, he'd been a leader in a drug gang whose battle with a rival operation had left 20 people dead...
...Maybe they care but can't extricate themselves from it...
...has asked the city council to establish a death penalty for those who murder in order to advance another criminal activity—rape, say, or robbery, or (especially) the distribution of drugs...
...residents don't even have to hassle with the crowds to see the corpses...
...It's not going to deter people from killing in anger," Hankins conceded...
...One of them died...
...know there is no chance that they're gonna burn for what they're doing ?' On the contrary, had Darryl Murchison and his companions thought much about the future—not one of their favorite pasttimes, it seems—they would have surmised that the odds of being burned are pretty high...
...Maybe the city's drug dealers and enforcers think themselves invulnerable to the violence all around them...
...Climbing into a taxi the next week, I gave the driver my address, only to have him explain that the corner outside my house had been the scene of a recent murder...
...As a case in point, consider the short life of Darryl Murchison, who at age 23 was one of the District's more accomplished drug hoodlums...
...What's more, the executions take place in full public view, where the death penalty's didactic value is highest...
...Hankins said, know that "there is no chance of being executed in the District—none" While, as a police officer, Hankins no doubt knows more about criminals than I do, the idea that "there is no chance of being executed in the District" is a strange one...
...In March, a teenage associate chased him into an alley and executed him with a shotgun...
...The speaker was Gary Hankins of the D.C...
...In 1987, he and 10 other young men were wounded by a spray of gunfire as they walked out of a go-go concert...
...Whichever, it's hard to see how adding a legislative death penalty to the de facto one that rules the streets will induce new rectitude...
...No last-minute whining from the ACLU...
...While Murchison may not have feared the courts—he'd been arrested twice in the past year for selling coke and crack, and released pending trial—he had ample evidence that curbside death threats were credible...
...I was flipping the radio dial a few months ago when I caught a talk-show guest who suggested he had the solution to the District's crime problem: executions...
...It happened so suddenly that my ears kept insisting it was only a backfire, though my eyes, like those of other sidewalk gawkers, knew it was the real thing...
...Scientifically, of course, this is awfully hard to prove...
...Lots of people in Washington haven't committed a murder during a drug deal this year, and it's entirely possible that some of them haven't done so for fear of reprisal—deterrence...
...And it worked" Now, D.C...
...In lobbying for the death penalty, Hankins told the talk-radio host that without it, "these kids...
Vol. 21 • May 1989 • No. 4
