Capital Punishment

By Kevin Stevens

The last state execution in the Republic of Ireland was in 1954, when Michael Manning was hanged in Mountjoy Prison for the murder of 65-year old nurse Catherine Cooper. Manning’s death inspired the play Last Call by Dublin writer Ciaran Creagh, whose father was one of the prison officers who stayed with Manning on his final night. The play was performed with particular resonance in Mountjoy for three nights in June of last year.

Capital punishment was abolished in 1964 for all but the murder of gardaí, diplomats and prison officers, and was fully banned by law in 1990. The EU forbids the death penalty, and Ireland is also party to several international agreements proscribing it. The 2001 referendum approving the Twenty-first Amendment gave the abolition constitutional standing.

The situation is very different in the United States.

Opponents of capital punishment in my home state of Montana were heartened last month when the state senate voted to abolish the state’s death penalty law. Their joy was short-lived. Last Tuesday, 13 March, the bill was defeated in the judiciary committee of the state’s house of representatives by a vote of 9-8. Montana remains one of 38 US states, as well as the federal government and the US military, with death penalty statutes.

Since 1976, when the US Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was constitutional and ended a ten-year national moratorium on capital punishment, over 1000 people have been executed in those 38 states. The first was Gary Gilmore, whose death by firing squad in Utah in January 1977 was memorably documented in Norman Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song and in the film of the same name starring Tommy Lee Jones. The most recent was Joseph Nichols, executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, on 7 March of this year, not long after the Supreme Court had declined to hear his final appeals and in spite of the fact that he had been only an accomplice to a murder and had not pulled the trigger.

The moral arguments to abolish the death penalty are compelling, but there are also highly practical reasons. Study after study shows that it has failed as a deterrent – states with capital punishment consistently maintain comparable rates of violent crime. It is hugely expensive. And it is arbitrary, with clear racial and demographic biases.

Though African-Americans make up only 12 percent of the US population, over half of those executed since the 1930s have been black. Blacks also make up 45 percent of the nearly 3500 inmates currently on death row – not because they commit more murders but because they are more often sentenced to death when they do. Also, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that when a murder victim is white and the murderer is black, the accused is much more likely to receive the death penalty than if the victim were black.

Poverty is another obvious bias. Because they cannot afford to hire private investigators, expert witnesses or expensive criminal lawyers, the poor are much more likely to be sentenced to death. And affording the right representation is critical. In Alabama, for example, over 20 percent of death row inmates do not have legal counsel, and in Texas 25 percent have been defended by lawyers who have been reprimanded, suspended or banned from practicing law.

According to the US Bill of Rights, citizens convicted of crimes cannot be inflicted with “cruel and unusual punishment.” Many executions have clearly violated this right. According to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, there have been at least 38 botched executions in the US over the last 30 years, including the execution in Florida last December of Angel Diaz, who grimaced and squirmed as he endured two injections and took over half an hour to die. The medical examiner who performed Diaz’s autopsy reported that that the needle had gone through his vein, so that the lethal chemicals were injected into soft tissue. All executions in Florida have been suspended since, pending an investigation.

And, of course, judges and juries can get it wrong. Since 1976, 123 death-row inmates have been exonerated and released. The Innocence Project, a New York-based non-profit legal clinic that leverages advances in DNA technology to assist the wrongly accused, has effected 194 exonerations since its founding in 1992, including 14 on death row.

Some states are responding to these arguments. New York’s highest court overturned it death penalty statute in 2004, a decision upheld last year by the state assembly. Kansas has also declared capital punishment unconstitutional. Illinois and New Jersey have declared a formal moratorium on executions, and a further 10 states have halted executions because of legal challenges to the lethal injection process. But the fact remains that over three-quarters of American states still have the death penalty.

Legislators in Montana could learn from the Irish approach. Or, indeed, from the 12 states that uphold the ban. Michigan remains proud of the fact that it was the first state to abolish the death penalty, in 1846, and that no-one has been executed there in more than 160 years. Its citizens understand that capital punishment diminishes a culture and increases its tolerance for injustice – both within its borders and beyond.

Published in The Irish Times, 5 April 2007