Everyone has a gut, emotional response to the death penalty. A lot of the time a crime pisses people off so much that they want to see someone pay, but that's where this ish gets to be a problem...if you don't pay attention to how the death penalty actually works in this country, you just might support it. However, you should know that by supporting the death penalty, you are supporting a system which punishes (often innocent) people based on racism, classism, and a demand for vengeance that will never be satisfied no matter how many people the government kills.

We all should know (if you don't, where have you been?) that in the U.S., Black and Latino men are more likely to go to jail for any crime, and their punishments tend to be much more severe (that's why crack has stiffer penalties than powder cocaine ... crack appears more in Black communities, and powder is used by more white people). This applies to the death penalty, too, where Black and Latino men are over-represented on death row. It should be no surprise that a Black man convicted of killing a white man is much more likely to get the death penalty than a Black or white man who killed a Black man, especially since the states with the highest number of executions are in the South (Texas, Virginia, and Florida are by far the top three). In many cases, the death penalty is a modern, "legal" version of lynch law. (By the way, I'm not trying to ignore women here, but there are far fewer cases where women are put on death row, which is why I keep talking about men.)

It has been said that the basis of capital punishment is, "Those who lack the capital get the punishment." Poor people are much more likely to be executed, because they can't afford a good lawyer and death penalty cases are very complicated. Public defenders are usually not enough, and in some places, they are horrible. There are many cases where the defendant's lawyer in death cases has slept through parts of the trial, failed to call key witnesses to prove innocence, or been drunk in court. Columiba University just did a study which showed that between 1973-1995, 2,370 death penalty convictions had to be thrown out on appeal because of unfair trials -- that's about 70% of the cases. However, the law is changing so unfair trials are less likely to be overturned. In 1995, Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which severely restricts the rights of people on death row to appeal based on unfair trail procedures, and the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to overturn capital convictions from state courts no matter how blatantly clear it is that a trial was wrong, because they don't want to interfere with a state's right to deliver "justice" it's own way. Politicians are so bloodthirsty that they often don't care if the person who gets executed actually commited the crime, and that means that quite a few innocent people face lethal injections.

One of the biggest things that people don't know is that it actually costs more to execute a person than to lock him up for the rest of his life. This is because of the complicated court process in death cases ... sure, we could eliminate this and save a lot of money, but then we're really diving into the old lynch law, killing people without a real trial.

A lot of people argue for the death penalty as a deterrant, but if this is the case, then why is the murder rate so much higher in the South than the Northeast? The South has many more executions than the Northeast, where many states don't even have the death penalty. Death row doesn't seem to be slowing murder in the South; I think it actually encourages murder, because if the government can murder someone for doing something wrong, why wouldn't a citizen feel like he can do the same thing? Also, the deterrant argument falls apart because almost nobody commits a crime thinking that he'll be caught, so he isn't considering the punishment he might get ... he expects not to get punished.

Sorry this was so long, but there's a lot to talk about with the death penalty, and it's never simple. If you want more, there's a great article at

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010108&s=sherrill

Peace.