Death Penalty Foes Place Hope in Legislatures

Opponents of the death penalty, having failed in a decade-long court challenge to capital punishment, said Wednesday that they will take their pleas back to state legislatures.

Organizations that include Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP plan to announce an “abolition” campaign in Washington today, hoping to arouse moral outrage over what they view as the barbaric and outdated practice of executing criminals.

Attorneys on the losing side in Wednesday’s case added that many state legislators, even some who support capital punishment, are troubled by suggestions that the system discriminates against blacks.

NAACP Receives Queries

“We have had calls from a number of legislators today asking how they can make legislative changes” to eliminate racial discrimination in the judicial system, said John Charles Boger, a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York. “We’re going to look carefully at those requests and see what can be done to tighten up some of the statutes. As it is, juries have too much freedom to roam.”

The Supreme Court, in its majority opinion Wednesday rebuffing an effort to overturn the death penalty on racial grounds in the choice of murderers sentenced to die, invited just such an effort.

“It is the legislatures, the elected representatives of the people, that are constituted to respond to the will and consequently the moral values of the people,” the court said. “Legislatures also are better qualified to weigh and evaluate the results of statistical studies in terms of their own local conditions and with a flexibility of approach that is not available to courts.”

Death Penalty Popular

But such an effort might run afoul of public opinion. Polls show that about three-fourths of Americans approve of the capital punishment laws now on the books. Since 1976, when the Supreme Court said that capital punishment is proper if the states clearly instruct juries on the circumstances when it is appropriate, two-thirds of the states have passed laws authorizing death sentences.

“They can’t get away from the fact that most people and even most minorities favor the death sentence,” said Daniel Popeo, counsel for the Washington Legal Foundation, which favors the death penalty. “There are black judges and black jurors out there and a lot of black victims of crime.”

Popeo said that the case decided Wednesday was handled correctly. The courts found no evidence of “intentional discrimination” and “no one was alleging he was innocent,” he added.

Rights Attorneys Dismayed

But civil rights attorneys said they were astounded and dismayed that the high court would ignore statistical data from several states showing a pronounced difference by race in who is sentenced to death and who is not. A study of Georgia homicides from 1973 to 1980 found that murderers of whites were 11 times more likely to receive the death sentence than murderers of blacks.

“The fact is that race and other illegitimate factors enter every day in cases involving capital punishment,” said Julius Chambers, counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “We are committed to carrying on the fight against a system that allows such injustice.”

He and other foes of the death sentences said they would continue to file legal challenges in individual cases, trying to show that a defendant’s right to “due process under the law” has been violated.

The Supreme Court aided that effort earlier this year when it said black defendants have a right to reopen their cases if a prosecutor had sought to exclude blacks from their juries.