Senate Opposes ‘Racial Justice’ Measure : Executions: The non-binding vote says the chamber is against letting Death Row inmates challenge their sentences on the basis of race bias.

The Senate on Wednesday expressed its opposition to a controversial provision contained in a House-approved crime bill that would allow persons convicted of capital crimes to challenge the death penalty on the basis of racial bias.

By a vote of 58 to 41, the Senate passed a non-binding resolution opposing the “racial justice act” that the House narrowly approved as part of its comprehensive crime legislation.

California’s Democratic senators split on the issue. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who faces reelection this year, voted for it. Sen. Barbara Boxer voted against it.

The outcome in the Senate--virtually identical to a vote on a similar bill in 1991--makes it less likely that the House provision will survive in the final version of the crime bill to be worked out by a Senate-House conference committee.

However, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who will lead the Senate delegation in the conference, said before the vote that he hoped to preserve a modified version of the provision.

Studies have shown that blacks and other minorities are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites and the death penalty is imposed much more often when the victim is white. The racial justice act would have overturned a death penalty if the defendant could prove by statistical evidence that racial bias was a factor in imposing the sentence.

In an unusual show of support for the House provision, several members of the Congressional Black Caucus took to the Senate floor during the vote in an effort to persuade senators to vote against the resolution.

The Clinton Administration has not taken a position on the issue.

The provision was retained in the House crime bill by a narrow, 217 to 212, vote after intense lobbying by Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) and his lieutenants. Its leading sponsors were Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose) and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), dean of the Black Caucus.

Opponents, bolstered by strong statements against the provision by prosecutors and state attorneys general, called it a sneak attack on the death penalty that would halt executions.

Advocates, however, said it was an effort to stop the persistent racial bias that has been documented in some parts of the South and West, where the death penalty is sought disproportionately in cases involving black or Latino defendants.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), ranking GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, has indicated that Republicans may filibuster final passage of the crime bill if it contains any version of the provision, which he derided as a “Death Penalty Abolition Act.”

“It would convert every death penalty case into a massive sideshow of statistical squabbles and quota quarrels,” Hatch declared.

Biden, however, said the provision would allow capital punishment to continue and would apply only to cases in which the defendant could prove that he or she was discriminated against on the basis of race.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) declared: “The simple fact is that a black defendant is more likely to be given a death sentence than a white defendant and criminals who kill white persons are more likely to receive the death penalty than those who kill blacks.”

Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.), the only black senator, put it more strongly: “The administration of the death penalty is truly one of the last vestiges of apartheid left in our system. In far too many jurisdictions, race is the primary factor--perhaps even the sole factor--in determining whether a defendant in a capital case will be put to death.”