"Capital punishment is to the rest of all law as surrealism is to realism. It destroys the logic of the profession."
      Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

If you tried to sell death-penalty stock on Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission would have you prosecuted for fraud. Capital punishment doesn't achieve any of the things its backers promise it will, and it is a spectacular waste of time and money.

Among the major Western nations, the United States has for a long while been alone in punishing murderers with some form of execution. Why do we hang on to the penalty? For one thing, we're suckered by our politicians into thinking we're more bloodthirsty than we really are. But also, maybe we're still addicted to the religious fundamentalism (Old Testament approval of lethal vengeance) that's been a part of our social thinking since colonial days. Or maybe we still feel a residual pull to the savage entertainment (bare-knuckle boxing, eye-gouging wrestling, eight-inch-knife fights à la Jim Bowie) of frontier days.

Capital punishment fits right in with those entertainments. But why has the job of running this grisly circus been turned over to such knuckleheads? Americans are supposed to be scientifically proficient, and electricity and deadly chemicals have certainly been around long enough for us to get the hang of using them. But time after time our brilliant executioners have messed up. Michael Radelet, an authority on capital punishment, has compiled a list of thirty-two botched executions since 1982. These from Florida will give you an idea of why they don't allow the public to attend.

When Jesse Joseph Tafero was electrocuted in 1990, witnesses said footlong blue and orange flames shot from the right side of his bobbing head. It took four minutes and three 2,000-volt jolts to finish him off (later, evidence came to light indicating he was innocent of murder). When Pedro Medina was electrocuted in 1997, it happened again. Flames from his head. When the execution was finished, the fire was patted out by a maintenance supervisor wearing asbestos gloves. Another official opened a window to disperse the smoke in the execution chamber. State officials decided it was time to retire "Old Sparky," as they fondly called the chair, and build a new one. Allen Lee Davis was the first to sit in it, last year. The executioner pulled the switch and blood poured from Davis's mouth. OK, that did it. It was time for something new to improve appearances. Florida would try poison. On June 8, 2000, Bennie Demps lay on the gurney while technicians struggled for thirty-three minutes to get the needle into four veins in three places. Demps shouted into the microphone dangling over his head: "They butchered me back there. I was in a lot of pain. They cut me in the groin, they cut me in the leg. I was bleeding profusely." The warden of the penitentiary claimed Demps was just "griping." What a bad sport.

When you come right down to it, these botched executions are merely sideshows and beside the point. Someday the penal folks will probably manage to get all the kinks in the execution process smoothed out and they'll be able to kill without a lot of flames and needle-jabbing. But the big question will remain: Why do we want this circus anyway?

Maybe We're Not So Heartless

It's true that polls usually show that Americans back the death penalty, 2 to 1. But it hasn't always been that way. In part of the 1950s and much of the 1960s, a majority of Americans said they opposed capital punishment, and in 1968 the US Supreme Court regarded death-penalty supporters as a "distinct and dwindling minority." They might have continued to dwindle if Republicans--Richard Nixon seeking the presidency in 1968 and Ronald Reagan seeking the California governorship in 1972--had not ignited the penalty as a national campaign issue. And the pro-death mob really got worked up (moving approval for the penalty toward 80 percent) after Willie Horton was thrown onto the fire in the elder George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign.

But now support for the penalty is moderating. Several polls, including a recent one by Gallup, show that when people are asked if they would prefer to have murderers sentenced to death or to life without possibility of parole, opinion splits, 50-50. And some polls show death losing. A Wall Street Journal poll in July found that because of the doubts that DNA testing had raised about the accuracy of some sentences, 63 percent favored suspending the penalty until questions of its fairness could be fully studied. Even without further testing, 42 percent said they thought the penalty was unfair (the same percentage thought it was fair; the rest said they weren't sure).

The kinder polls result from growing awareness that innocent people are probably being executed. After all, eighty-nine people have been released from death row since 1973 because evidence of their innocence has emerged--thirty-eight since 1993. Some of the innocent ones among the thousands now waiting for execution simply won't have that kind of luck.

Geographically, the popularity of executions seems extremely limited. Thirty-one states have used the death penalty in the past quarter-century, but six states account for two-thirds of the executions, and ten states account for 82 percent. Texas alone accounts for more than one-third. Of the eighty-four executions in the nation this year, forty, or almost half, were in Texas--the largest number of executions in any one year in any state in the nation's history. But wait. Look at what's happening nationally. Executions are down 14 percent from the ninety-eight in 1999, and the Justice Department's latest figures for people sentenced to die in 1999 are significantly below the average for the past five years (272 versus 300).

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