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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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by Charles Levendosky
America's death penalty madness intensifies. By the evening of April 24, states had executed 24 individuals since 1998 began - seven more than on the same date last year, a record execution year. The week of April 20 added four bodies the execution count. The last week of April will throw on at least two more. A week doesn't pass without one or two or more state-sponsored lethal injections or electrocutions. Like a fever, the United States may top 100 for 1998. Blood fever. And Texas will undoubtedly continue to lead this made delirium, as it does with five lethal injections for the year. One of those five was 17 years old, a juvenile, when he murdered Anne Walsh, a woman who befriended him. As a child, Joseph John Cannon was sexually abused by one of his stepfathers and as a teen, by a grandfather. At the age of 10, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and as suffering from organic brain damage resulting from sniffing solvents. Pope John Paul wrote to Texas Gov. George Bush Jr., asking him to spare Cannon - to no avail. Texas is one of 24 states that allow those under the age of 18 to be sentenced to death. The state has another juvenile offender scheduled for execution, Robert Anthony Carter. The death room and a gurney await him on May 18. After the school-yard killings in Arkansas, one Texas legislator proposed a bill that would allow the execution of those who were 11 when they committed their crimes. Back in the late 1980s, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held that a defense attorney who sleeps during his client's murder trial does not qualify as "ineffective assistance of legal counsel." This is the same court that held that introducing an involuntary confession in a murder trial was "harmless error" and therefore did not constitute grounds for reversing a conviction. Amnesty International issued a 24-page report in March, "The Death Penalty in Texas: Lethal Injustice" that condemns the state for the way it handles capital crime cases. Unfortunately, Texas is not alone in its execution excesses. The U.S. Supreme Court is also fevered with the madness and has been for more than a decade. In 1989, the high court decided that executing John Paul Penry with a mental age of less than 7 would not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against inflicting "cruel and unusual punishment." The ruling opened death row to numbers of mentally retarded individuals. Now Penry faces death at the hands of Texas prison officials unless his latest appeal succeeds. Three mentally retarded convicts were executed this year so far - in Virginia, Missouri and Texas. California is set to execute Horace Edwards Kelly, a mentally ill convict who believes death row is a vocational school. There is a temporary stay on his execution while the state determines his mental competency. The high cost of death-row appeals is causing Florida's court system to go bankrupt trying to shove murderers into its 75-year-old electric chair. And on Friday, an Associated Press story reported that there are allegations that attorneys paid to represent death-row inmates took wagers in a "death pool" on who would live and who would die. Virginia and Arizona both executed foreign nationals this month without having informed them of their rights to speak to officials of their consulates. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations - a treaty the United States signed to protect its citizens overseas - demands that right. Virginia executed Angel Breard, a Paraguayan citizen, over the objections of his country and the United Nations' International Court of Justice at The Hague, Netherlands. Arizona executed Jose Villafuerte, a Honduran citizen, over the objections of his country. We cannot argue that the law demands these executions for the crime of murder, if we do not also follow the law. One cannot pick and choose which law to obey and which to ignore. Any treaty ratified by two-thirds vote of the Senate is the law of the land. At this juncture, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, there are approximately 70 foreign nationals on death row in the United States but very few had been informed of their consular rights before trial. Our border neighbors, Mexico and Canada, condemn our thirst for executions. They no longer use the death penalty. The world community condemns our blood fever. On April 3, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights again approved an Italian resolution calling for a moratorium on executions worldwide. Twenty-six nations voted in favor. For the second time, however, the United States voted against the resolution. We were joined by China, Rwanda, Indonesia, South Korea, Sudan, Botswana, Pakistan, and the Republic of Congo. Such is the company we keep in our lust for the death penalty. We are being isolated internationally by our sickness - quarantined for our execution excesses. Last year, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution calling for a moratorium on the use of capital punishment until state and federal policies "ensure that death penalty cases are administered fairly and impartially, in accordance with due process, and minimize the risk that innocent persons may be executed." On Oct. 20, 1997 the Catholic Bishops of Texas called for a rejection of the death penalty: "We believe that capital punishment contributes to a climate of violence in our state." And on Feb. 28, the General Assembly of the Texas Conference of Churches unanimously adopted a resolution opposing the death penalty. Iowa Catholic Bishops may have helped defeat an effort to reinstate the death penalty in their state earlier this year by their strong opposition. And on April 20, Nebraska Gov. Ben Nelson signed a measure into law that prevents the execution of those with mental retardation in his state. Nebraska is the 12th state to adopt such a law. Yet state-sanctioned killings continue - at an increasing rate.
Charles Levendosky, editorial page editor of the Casper (WY) Star-Tribune, writes frequently on First Amendment issues. Visit his website: FACT - First Amendment Cyber-Tribune Enrich Your Life With A Book About Politics & Current Events 
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