Death Trip: The American Way of Execution (Page 2)

Killing for Votes

The death penalty seems to be a kind of gruesome flypaper that ambitious politicians get stuck on. Bill Clinton, for example. No Republican was going to out-tough him. Running for President in 1992, then-Governor Clinton interrupted his New Hampshire campaign to return to Arkansas and preside over the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury for killing a cop. After shooting the cop he tried to commit suicide but succeeded only in performing a lobotomy on himself, thereby becoming so mentally retarded he didn't know what an execution was. He saved a piece of pie from his last meal because he thought he was coming back to his cell.

In 1994, with much publicity, Clinton signed an act expanding the federal death penalty to cover sixty crimes, including three that don't involve murder. Two years later, another election year, he signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which makes it much, much harder for murder defendants to have their habeas corpus appeals--their claims of unfair, unconstitutional trials--heard in federal courts. These actions were featured in his first three re-election campaign ads on TV.

But George W. Bush has exploited the death penalty even more lavishly than Clinton. Texas has executed 239 since the Supreme Court revived the death penalty a quarter-century ago, and more than half (152) were executed after Bush became governor in 1995; his execution chamber has been by far the most active in the nation, killing an average of one prisoner every two weeks. One of Bush's first acts as governor was to reject the clemency plea for Mario Marquez, whose severe brain damage left him with an IQ of 60 and the skills of a 7-year-old. Although the Texas Senate is very conservative, it passed a bill to bar the execution of profoundly retarded prisoners; the House was about to approve it, too, when Bush blocked further action by saying, "I like the law the way it is right now." In an interview shortly before the execution of born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker in 1998, he was said to have mimicked her plea for mercy. During his presidential campaign reporters asked him if he was bothered that some indigents on Texas's death row had been represented by lawyers who slept though part of their trials; he responded with a chuckle. In his first year as governor, George W. easily persuaded the legislature to shorten the process for death-penalty appeals. This program of speedy executions has been adopted as a model by brother Jeb, Governor of Florida, who got his Republican legislature to pass a shorter appeals process. Brad Thomas, Jeb's top adviser on capital punishment, told the St. Petersburg Times, "What I hope is that we become more like Texas. Bring in the witnesses, put them on a gurney and let's rock and roll."

The really pervasive political use of executions is right down at the grassroots. In most states with the death sentence, judges are elected. This includes state Supreme Court justices. And if they help overturn even one death sentence (as Justice Penny White, a Democrat, learned in Tennessee) their political opponents will run them off the bench by charging them with "favoring the rights of criminals over the rights of victims." The most famous exhibition of this sort was in California in the days when Chief Justice Rose Bird and her allies on the bench reversed sixty-six of the sixty-eight death sentences they reviewed. A Republican crusade swept them out of office. Particularly in the South, some judges and attorneys general campaign like Savonarola. Many may justifiably campaign that way because they had previously been prosecuting attorneys who, in highly publicized trials, sent many a criminal to his grave. Charlie Condon became South Carolina's attorney general in 1994 by reminding voters that he had put eleven men on death row.

Never Trust a Prosecutor

Misconduct abounds. Prosecutors who bully, lie and misuse or hide evidence are as common as baseball players who chew gum. In all the most active capital-punishment states, prosecutors often build their cases by hiding evidence and using jailhouse snitches eager to lie in return for lower sentences for themselves. They also rely on junk science, such as the widely discredited use of hair comparisons as forensic evidence. And then there are the psychiatrists. In Texas the death penalty cannot be imposed unless the jury unanimously agrees that if turned loose the defendant would likely kill again. Prosecutors know which psychiatrists--"killer shrinks," critics call them--are most useful. One of their favorites is Dr. James Grigson, who has examined hundreds of capital defendants and predicted 80 percent would be forever dangerous. Randall Dale Adams, accused of killing a Dallas policeman, was sentenced to death after Dr. Grigson testified that he was an "extreme sociopath" and that there was "about a one thousand percent" chance he would always be a threat to society. (After the documentary The Thin Blue Line focused on prosecutorial misconduct in Adams's case, he was released from prison, having served twelve years. Adams is now married, employed and living a nonviolent life.) In 1995 the American Psychiatric Association--which has found that two out of three predictions of long-term future dangerousness are incorrect--expelled Grigson for what it considered extravagantly untrustworthy courtroom testimony in a number of cases. He said the APA is "a bunch of liberals who think queers are normal." Texas prosecutors continue to use him. They also use the testimony about dangerousness from psychiatrists who have never even talked to the prisoner in question.

And the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's chief psychologist helped send nine men to death row by arguing that they were a future menace to society because they were Hispanic or black.

A majority of the justices on Illinois's Supreme Court said capital punishment is unconstitutional because it allows politically ambitious prosecutors too much discretion in choosing whether to seek that penalty.

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