on 5/10/00 5:21 AM, Issodhos @aol.com at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Between 1977 and 1998 462,720 persons died in the U.S. at the hand of
> murderers.  During the same period only 499 murderers were executed.  Or
> approximately 1
> murderer lost its life for every 927 murder victims who had their lives
> taken.
> That's what -- approximately .001 percent of murderers who are executed?  It
> seems it takes quite a bit of effort to get executed in America.  One might
> even say it is rare relative to the number of victims who are killed each
> year.
Although I support abolition of the death penalty, the statistic you offer
is not surprising. The Supreme Court, when it reinstatated the death penalty
in 1976, explicitly said that it's not enough to kill someone to get
executed; there have to be sufficient aggravating circumstances, coupled
with insufficient mitigating circumstances, to warrant imposition of capital
punishment. Thus, there are explicit legal hurdles to overcome before
capital punishment can be imposed. Then there is the legal distinction
between premeditatedd murder and other kinds of homicide, which your
statistic blurs. Only intentional, premeditated homicides are death
penalty-eligible. Your numbers, I think, include all types of homicide.

On top of that, the appeals process still takes about a decade or more to
carry out, so there is a lag built into these figures that shifts the
excecutions backwards about that many years vis a vis the number of murders.
Put another way, the numder of homicides is about a decade ahead of the
number of executions, with the number of executions starting only post-1976.

The reason the Supreme Court--specifically, Harry Blackmun, who also
authored Roe v. Wade--mandated these hurdles was to overcome the
demonstrated arbitrariness that historically governed who got executed and
who didn't. These hurdles were supposed to reserve capital punishment for
only the most heinous crimes, and remove factors like race from the mix. 20
years or so later, just before his death, Blackmun recanted his support for
the death penalty, saying that this effort had clearly failed, and that
there was no other way that he saw for the problem to be remedied. Thus,
Blackmun, the author of Gregg v Georgia, ultimately joined the anti-death
penalty camp.
--
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA
"The Clinton-haters and their friends in the media are like a cargo cult:
they keep expecting something to fall from the sky, and years of
disappointment never seem to awaken any doubt." - Joe Conason