Death Penalty Foes Converge on Supreme Court
By David Fein
CNSNews.com Correspondent
July 01, 2003

(CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Supreme Court has completed its business for the summer, but there was plenty of activity on the steps of the historic building Monday as protesters amassed for the 10th annual Fast and Vigil to Abolish the Death Penalty, a movement also known as "Starvin' for Justice."

Sponsored by the Abolitionist Action Committee and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), the rally served as a reminder of two Supreme Court decisions involving the constitutionality of the death penalty.

Sunday, June 29, marked the 31st anniversary of the 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision, in which the Court found that the death penalty had been applied in an "arbitrary and capricious manner." More than 600 prisoners had their death sentences reduced to life imprisonment, and all states were forced to rewrite their death penalty laws.

But Wednesday, July 2, is the 27th anniversary of the July 2, 1976, Gregg v. Georgia ruling, which allowed executions to resume in the Untied States.

Abe Bonowitz, director of Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, began Monday's mid-afternoon rally by repeating the line: "What do we want? Abolition! When do we want it? Now!"

Bonowitz was followed by Etan Thomas, a professional basketball player with the Washington Wizards, who read poems that questioned what he saw as the racial and economic inequality of meting out the death penalty in the United States.

Thomas said he regarded those politicians keeping the death penalty alive as "scandalous barbarians, enforcing evil traditions." He went on to ask those individuals: "What gives you the right to decide who deserves to die?" and "Why are you trying to do God's work for him? You are not on that level."

He also warned those he saw as the purveyors of the death penalty: "If you play God too long, the real one might get upset."

David Elliot of the NCADP emphasized what he saw as "the innate inequality of the death penalty in the United States, a system that is racist and is anti-poor."

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death penalty group, criticized what he saw as the exorbitantly high cost of imposing capital punishment. "Imposing the death penalty costs $2 million more than sentencing someone to life in prison without parole," Dieter said.

Dieter said that especially in states like California that are facing huge budget deficits, the money could be better spent on law enforcement and other crime prevention methods.

The rally ended with Juan Roberto Melendez, whom death penalty opponents regard as the 99th wrongly condemned death row inmate. Melendez was convicted of first-degree murder and armed robbery in 1984 and spent 17 years and eight months in jail before being freed because a confession by the actual murderer had not been allowed in the case.

"There's going to be mistakes made, and if they make them, they may not be reversed. You cannot give freedom to a dead man," Melendez told those gathered in front of the Supreme Court.

Thomas R. Eddlem, a writer and analyst with The New American, a conservative news magazine, addressed what he saw as some of the common fallacies of anti-death penalty arguments.

The claim that the death penalty unfairly targets blacks and minorities is fraudulent, Eddlem claimed. "The majority of those executed since 1976 have been white," he said.

Eddlem also countered studies like the one from Columbia University in 2000 that asserted death penalty judgments over a 23-year period had contained a national error rate of 68 percent.

He noted that the "study" defined "error" as including any issue requiring further review by a lower court. Furthermore, he emphasized: "After reviewing 23 years of capital sentences, the study's authors (like other researchers) were unable to find a single case in which an innocent person was executed. Thus, the most important error rate - the rate of mistaken executions - is zero."

Eddlem also addressed the common argument by death penalty opponents - that capital punishment provides no deterrent to other criminals.

"Tangible proof of deterrence alone is not a valid reason for capital punishment, nor is it the main rationale employed by astute death penalty advocates," Eddlem stated. "One should be punished for his own crimes and not merely to deter others."

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