N.Y. Capital Punishment Debate Heats Up as Murder Rate Soars

For New York state, the execution of Eddie Lee Mays in Sing Sing’s electric chair on Aug. 15, 1963, was the 695th--and last--time it used the device of death it introduced to the world in 1890.

But in the quarter-century since, debate about the death penalty and its usefulness or offensiveness has no more faded than the state’s murder rate, now well above the national average.

Is life more precious in places where governments refuse to execute murderers? Are the streets safer? Are governors right to veto capital punishment legislation, ignoring what polls indicate is overwhelming support for the death penalty in New York?

In 25 years, the rituals still carried on elsewhere concerning the electric chair, the last meal, the prison chaplain soothing the condemned, have been supplanted in New York with new rituals of emotional debate in the Legislature and among citizens.

As frustrations mount on all sides of the issue, so do the murder statistics. New York’s criminals have not left the business of killing even while the state has.

Murder Rate Triples

The state’s murder rate is nearly three times higher now than on the day the 34-year-old Mays paid with his life for killing a woman in a Harlem bar robbery. Below the national average in 1963, the state’s murder rate in 1987 stood at 11.3 per 100,000 people, compared to 8.3 murders per 100,000 nationally.

“Those who favored abolishing the death penalty said society would be more civil and we’d have about the same number of killings but less crime generally,” said Republican Dale Volker, a former police officer from suburban Buffalo and the state senate’s strongest capital-punishment advocate.

“Eventually, they said, we’d have a more moralistic system. Well, clearly, the total and complete reversal has happened. We’ve never had such viciousness as we have today. You have a situation today where our streets are more of a war zone than at any time in history.”

The chief question in any debate about the death penalty is whether it makes criminals think twice before committing capital offenses. It is also the question no one can answer with enough certainty to settle the issue.

Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a Democrat who has vetoed death penalty bills in each of his six years in office, says the sentence has become a sort of cure-all for many of society’s “terrible, terrible problems.

“Just keep saying ‘death penalty,’ ” he said of some advocates. “Get them mesmerized with language. Hypnotize everybody. Just keep looking at the electric chair.”

Cuomo says there is no proof that the threat of that chair deters would-be murderers; he suspects that it could make some criminals more vicious. He also argues that too many people were wrongly convicted of capital crimes to feel confident in sending prisoners to their deaths.

Abandoned in 1965

That uncertainty prompted the Legislature and former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to abandon the death penalty in 1965, except in cases involving the murder of peace officers and prison guards.

Later decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, effectively wiped capital punishment statutes off the state books, and they were not restored after the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to resume putting murderers to death.

Better Education Urged

The way to lower the state’s murder and crime rates is to provide better education and health programs, including efforts against drug and alcohol abuse, especially for poor young people, Cuomo says. To control criminals, he adds, law agencies must be well-funded and enough prison cells must exist to accommodate all offenders.

“Cost you a fortune,” the governor conceded.

The Cuomo Administration’s criminal justice services coordinator, John Poklemba, said the death penalty would not “affect the vast majority of violent crimes that we need to do something about.

“The emergence of crack and the increase in the amount of drugs that are now on the street, the enormous amount of cocaine that is on the streets, is overwhelming the whole criminal justice system,” Poklemba said.

The topic of crack-dealing desperadoes is a good example of how vexing the debate can be. Volker and other death-penalty supporters say re-establishing the punishment is just the message society must send. But Poklemba said the prospect of the electric chair means little to such criminals.

“They have Uzi machine guns,” he said. “They’re fighting it out among themselves (for drug-selling territory). They certainly don’t care about a death penalty. The threat of being found guilty and being executed 10 to 15 years down the road is not going to be a deterrent if . . . taking a chance of getting blown away that day doesn’t deter him.”

500 a Year

Aides to Volker say that under a bill that’s repeatedly been before the Legislature, the perpetrators of about one-quarter of New York state’s 2,000 murders a year could be charged with capital murder and sentenced to the electric chair.

But the measure won’t become law this year. Although the Senate voted to override Cuomo’s veto, the Assembly last month fell seven votes short of the 100 needed.

Although most New Yorkers seem to have an opinion about the death penalty, they apparently don’t feel strongly enough to make it the determining factor in who holds the state’s highest office. Cuomo and Gov. Hugh Carey before him both won election against pro-capital-punishment foes.

“Cuomo and Carey are important for the proposition that political leaders who make it quite clear that they will not have the death penalty because they don’t propose to be responsible for official homicides” can still get elected, said Henry Schwarzchild of the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the death penalty. “While the public disagrees, it will also respect that.”

Cuomo is sure to be standing in the way again in 1989, and for as long as he is governor. But Volker says death-penalty supporters will keep up their end of the ritual too.

“I am convinced we will eventually override,” he said.