9-27-06, 8:44 am
But his impending execution in the red state of South Dakota, potentially the first execution in that state since reinstating it in 1979, is still stirring debate about whether or not the death penalty is a measure of justice.
According to media reports, South Dakota's Republican Governor Mike Rounds, who is Catholic, commuted Page's execution last month on the pretext of technical discrepancies between state law and the methods of killing used by the prison authorities.
Underlying this pretext, one defense attorney from South Dakota explained to the local media, may be the real concern that the specific technique of execution (lethal injection) may be cruel. The delay in Page’s case has helped publicize the ensuing debate.
In that usually quiet state, some influential voices strongly rejected the death penalty as an inhumane, brutal form of punishment. Both the Catholic bishop of the Rapids City archdiocese and the bishop of the Dakotas Conference of the United Methodist Church (President Bush's church, incidentally) denounced Page’s impending execution and urged permanent forms of punishment other than killing. Both religious leaders argued that redemption and forgiveness are higher forms of human responses to killing than revenge and a 'cycle of violence' perpetuated by the state’s killing of an inmate.
Opposition Grows
From the Catholic Church's recent strong reiteration of its opposition to the death penalty to the refusal of doctors in San Quentin Prison's death row to use lethal injection on cruelty grounds earlier this year, opposition to the death penalty has gained momentum.
Over the past few years, incidents like former Republican Illinois Governor George Ryan's self-imposed moratorium on the death penalty in that state after revelations of torture by Chicago police and a wave of exonerations of death row inmates by new DNA evidence (14 since 1989, according to the Innocence Project) brought serious debate to the public's attention. Massive protests over the execution of Stanley 'Tookie' Williams and New York's de facto ban on the practice this past year, pushed the death penalty again into the headlines.
In the words of David Elliot, spokesperson for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, these developments show an 'important climate change' that indicate 'the death penalty is withering away in the United States.'
Public opinion is roughly split over the death penalty when people are given a choice between sentencing convicted murderers to life without parole and the death penalty. And the number of death sentences handed down per year has fallen from more than 300 since the late 1990s to around 100, said Elliot.
The conservative-dominated US Supreme Court has even aided anti-death penalty momentum. In recent cases, Elliot pointed out, the Court ruled that only juries can hand down death sentences and against executing juvenile offenders and severely mentally disabled people. This past summer, the Court also ruled in favor of giving more weight to new DNA evidence not available at the time of trial when appellate judges make decisions about ordering new trials for defendants sentenced to death. Legal observers view these decisions as potentially increasing the fairness of the judicial process and reducing the use of the death penalty.
The failure of the New York legislature to re-write its death penalty laws after a New York state court struck them down last year, means 'that New York now effectively has no death penalty, although strangely they still have a couple of people on death row,' Elliot stated.
In New Jersey, the state legislature reinstated the death penalty in 1992. Even some Republicans are now expressing criticism for having spent $253 million on it without having executed anyone in those 15 years. For this reason, Elliot expressed a belief in the likelihood of abolishing it there.
He also added that important efforts to abolish the death penalty in North Carolina and New Mexico will happen in the coming year. In fact, a potential shift in several state legislatures from Republican to Democratic control this election cycle may have a big impact on several state-centered efforts to either abolish or limit the use of the death penalty. New state legislators are more likely to be open to lobbying groups with reform and abolition proposals.
Race and the Death Penalty
The cruelty of the death penalty aside, critics of the death penalty argue that persistent racial disparities from the bottom to the top of the judicial system make its use too unfair for a democratic society.
When they are not simply denying that racism plays a role in the criminal justice system, people who support the death penalty, like right-wing activist and Bush supporter Michael Paranzino, whose website ThrowAwaytheKey.org is little more than a donation page and collection of links to articles that quote his diatribes, insist that creating mandatory death sentences would make the death penalty more fair.
While arguments for mandatory sentences ignore racial disparity throughout the process before sentencing – well-documented inequalities include racial profiling, unequal sentencing, disproportionate incarceration rates, jury bias, and economic inequalities – they also fail to address some fundamental facts about race on death row.
According to Elliot, 'People need to know that it is not the race of the perpetrator so much that makes a difference, but rather the race of the victim.'
Of the 1,047 executions since 1976, more than 80 percent of the victims in these cases were white, despite the fact that whites and Blacks are murdered in nearly equal numbers. Elliot highlighted his home state of Texas, which leads the nation in executions with 376 over the past 30 years.
Texas 'has executed precisely one white inmate whose victim was Black,' Elliot said. 'By contrast, the number of Blacks who have been executed for killing white victims in Texas is in the hundreds. It’s really the race of the victim that makes a difference.'
'Draconian responses' like mandatory penalties, Elliot argued, will increase the rate of erroneous convictions. It will also inevitably increase the rate of people who are executed wrongfully as well, he concludes.
--Reach Joel Wendland at
