An Issue of Morality

When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris last week, it pushed California to the brink of that bleak moment when men and women will once again be put to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Barring some unlikely intervention, the 37-year-old Harris, who was sentenced to die 11 years ago for the callous murder of two teen-age boys in San Diego, will be executed within the next few months.

How one responds to that prospect is, in some large measure, a question of moral outlook. In a pluralistic society like ours, reasonable people are bound to differ in this. The Times agrees with the view of Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who holds “that the death penalty is a cruel and unusual punishment.” It is worth recalling that opinions echoing his view prevail throughout the developed world, and that America is alone among the Western democracies in maintaining active capital punishment. While we cannot let others decide for us, we ought not to be wholly indifferent to their thought and experience, particularly on questions of such magnitude.

The majority of Americans believe that executions serve the interests of public safety and justice and are sanctioned by the West’s Judeo-Christian moral tradition. Unfortunately, rich as it may be, that tradition provides no uncontestable guidance on the question.

But what of the view that execution serves the utilitarian interests of public safety and justice? Does the death penalty deter others from murder? Does it spare society the cost of maintaining killers in prison at public expense? Does it further justice by providing a penalty proportionate to the criminal act?

On these questions, there are facts and not just views: A 1988 United Nations study of capital punishment worldwide concluded that “the evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis.” That finding echoed earlier governmental studies in the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan, as well as controlled social science research in the United States. Here, in fact, 13 states have executed 107 prisoners since 1977, and at present there are more than 2,000 individuals under sentence of death in 34 states. None of this has had any demonstrable impact on the homicide rate in the particular states or in the nation as a whole. Proponents of the death penalty argue that this is because its application is too difficult and infrequent. They are, however, unable to say exactly where the deterrent threshold would be reached: Would it be with one execution a month, a week, a day?

The question of cost is more difficult to assess precisely. But most studies suggest that unless society wishes to abolish most of the rights to due process, counsel and appeal it now affords those accused of capital crimes--most of the time at public expense--the price of imposing the death penalty outstrips the amount required to maintain an individual in prison for life without parole, a punishment The Times endorses.

On the issue of basic justice, capital punishment’s attractiveness as a remedy equivalent to the crime is outweighed by the inequality of its application. In California, as in the nation, the poor are more likely to be sentenced to die than the rich; blacks and Latinos are more likely to be executed than Anglos; men accused of murder receive the death penalty more frequently than women so accused.

Since 1900, 349 innocent Americans are known to have been unjustly convicted of capital crimes. Twenty-three of them actually were executed. The respected human rights organization Amnesty International believes that within the last three years two innocent men--Willie Jasper Darden in Florida and Edward Earl Johnson in Mississippi--were sent to their deaths. Both were black. Justice is not served when an absolutely final conclusion is imposed by an all-too-fallible process.