Death Penalty: an Incentive or Deterrent?

Talk about cutthroat competition: Almost every morning, William Bonin, Randy Kraft, Lawrence Bittacker, and Doug Clark sit down for a quiet game of bridge.

Theirs is no different than the sort of game that goes on in San Clemente condominium complex recreation rooms each day. Except that this game is played in the exercise yard of San Quentin. Except that these players were convicted of killing 49 people.

In the November Vanity Fair, Mark MacNamara describes this unusual Death Row card game and profiles the players. At least three of the men are ruthless monsters. The fourth, Clark, may not be guilty of the crimes for which he is scheduled to die, MacNamara writes.

That leads to the real subject of this meandering report--the death penalty.

MacNamara looks at both sides of the argument, but comes down on the side of opponents. To get rolling, McNamara runs through the anti-death penalty arguments: “between 1900 and 1984, researchers discovered that 23 men had been executed who were later found to have been innocent. Eight more who were innocent died in prison, and still another 22 had close calls, sometimes being reprieved only minutes before they were to die.”

But MacNamara, who has spent a lot of time on Death Row interviewing Clark, also came up with a few not-so-common arguments.

Take, for example, murderer Edmund Kemper III, who killed his grandparents, murdered six students in Santa Cruz, and decapitated his mother. A psychiatrist found that one of his fantasies in grade school was to die in the gas chamber. So the death penalty may, in fact, be an incentive to commit murder, MacNamara suggests.

In contradiction of the deterrent argument, he also points to the case of a San Quentin guard, who each day oversaw the men lined up on Death Row. He was later convicted of raping a woman while threatening her with a butcher knife.

As Douglas Clark says, “The death penalty sure deterred him, didn’t it?”

REQUIRED READING

Some say men and guns tamed the American West; some say the real settling took place only when women came in and put down roots; and some say the West was settled just fine before the first European man or woman arrived and made a mess of things. Author Larry McMurtry extends some credence to each of these viewpoints. But in an extraordinary essay in the Oct. 22 New Republic, McMurtry laments that the current school of “revisionist” historians, driven mainly by a new feminist perspective, fails to embrace the importance of the wonderfully vivid West of the imagination. Cowboys and fur trappers saw what they did as a calling; “the revisionists see a West where people had only jobs, and crappy, environmentally destructive jobs at that.”

To McMurtry, though, the westward expansion was, despite the tragedies, a Quixotic venture. Historians who fail to see the glory in it--real and imagined--have a sadly diminished understanding of the way life is, he believes.

* Any good prosecutor would have wanted to nail Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. “But at what cost?” Stuart Taylor Jr. asks in the October American Lawyer. The U.S. government ran a “seamy bait-and-switch operation--luring the reluctant target to a hotel bedroom, teasing his libido, plying him with cognac, steering him toward crack as he pants for sex, persisting when he says no, and finally bagging him after 50 minutes.” Contrary to Barry’s “demagogic” allegations, “the case was not driven by racism. It was driven by capable, well-motivated investigators so scandalized by the mayor’s catch-me-if-you-can lawlessness that they got carried away,” Taylor writes. “They violated the counsel of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., that it is a lesser evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”

* In the past year, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report all ran fewer references to and photographs of women than in the year before, according to a survey by Women in Communications Inc. The number of female bylines in those publications, however, increased from 32% to 37% over the same period.

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

The totally hip and increasingly meaty Los Angeles-based Exposure magazine has gone belly up. Publisher and Editor-In-Chief Henry M. Shea Jr. said that he arrived at the offices of the three-year-old publication last Thursday evening and found that owner Fairchild Publications, a Capital Cities/ABC Inc. company that publishes M-Inc., Women’s Wear Daily and other magazines, had changed the locks.

That night the staff gathered at Shea’s home to toast their final issue. In the morning, under the eye of a Fairchild executive, staff members were allowed to pick up their personal effects and vacate--staff Rolodexes stayed behind.

“It was an economic decision based on a soft advertising market,” Shea said. “(Fairchild) saw a bad ad market getting worse.” The 15-person staff and free-lancers will be paid money due them, Shea said. Meanwhile, he is looking for investors, and may attempt to exercise his 60-day buy-back option.

ESOTERICA

The “I Hate Mayonnaise Club!” has a motto: “Just Say No Mayo!” It also has a newsletter to spread the word and inspire solidarity behind the cause. As editor Charles Memminger writes, “We can sympathize with George Bush in his battle against broccoli, but our fight is much harder. No one ever put broccoli on my ham sandwich.”

(“I Hate Mayonnaise,” P.O. Box 8825, Honolulu, Hawaii, 96830.)