Political Fight Mounts Over Anti-Crime Bill : Congress: GOP’s unhappiness with a ‘racial justice’ provision threatens the legislation.

When it cleared the Senate and the House by overwhelming margins, this year’s anti-crime bill looked like a proposal whose time had come.

It offered a President hungry for domestic accomplishments a way of spawning innovative projects in cities large and small. And it offered lawmakers with violence-plagued constituents an opportunity to demonstrate determination to crack down on crime.

But somewhere on the way to its gala signing ceremony, the most-likely-to-succeed package is in danger of disappearing in deep political quicksand.

The widespread agreement on many of its aspects is now being overshadowed by a bitter fight over one provision that relates to racial disparity between convicted murderers who receive the death penalty and those who do not. The so-called “racial justice” provision, which was passed only by the House, has become such an explosive issue that it threatens to trigger a Senate filibuster and jeopardize passage of the legislation.

An increasingly anxious White House and Democratic leaders in Congress are struggling to find a route through a minefield of racial politics to passage of the measure, but so far they have been stumped. “I think we are in a real box,” said one House Democratic leader.

The debate, which is being waged as House and Senate negotiators try to find a compromise anti-crime bill acceptable to each chamber, says as much as anything about the very different ways that various coalitions in Congress react to the crime issue as well as the limits on the White House’s ability to cope with it.

The racial justice provision, sponsored by Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), a longtime civil rights advocate, would allow defendants convicted of capital crimes to challenge their death sentences by producing statistical evidence to prove that the penalty was being applied in a discriminatory manner in their area of the country. The judge who presided over a challenged conviction then would be empowered to change the sentence to life imprisonment.

Driving the debate is a belief that in some regions, the death penalty is applied more often in cases where blacks murder whites than in cases of blacks murdering blacks or whites murdering whites. The issue is by no means clear, however, with advocates and opponents alike marshaling statistics that they contend either prove or disprove that such bias exists.

The provision barely passed the House on a 217-212 vote and was not included in the Senate bill.

“It will identify in certain jurisdictions those crimes for which blacks frequently get the death penalty while white defendants rarely do,” Edwards said in a recent letter to colleagues. “Only a defendant who can show that his case fits such a pattern of racial disparity can invoke the act.”

In any case, Edwards said, prosecutors would have a chance to rebut claims of racial bias, with the decision made by a judge based on a preponderance of the evidence.

Opponents, however, view the measure as an indirect attack on the death penalty rather than as a procedure to deal with alleged racial bias in capital cases. They said that the true intent of the provision is to provide defendants with another vehicle for appeal, one that is subject to laborious statistical arguments that will further tie up the courts and limit executions.

Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), who has led the fight against the measure in the House, has said its passage “would mean the end of the death penalty in most jurisdictions where it currently exists.”

Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), whose views on crime issues are shared by most of his GOP colleagues, said there is no way to compare one death sentence with another, since the circumstances of each case are different. Any attempts to deal with racial bias, he said, should be limited to “the four corners of the case.”

“I don’t see many Republican votes for the bill with the racial justice provision in it,” Hyde said. The compromise proposals floated by Democrats so far have failed to make the provision more acceptable, he added.

In the Senate, several Republican senators have threatened to kill the entire crime bill by filibustering if it includes the provision. Some Democrats said that delay in the Senate-House negotiations is necessary so that the 60 votes needed to end a possible filibuster can be found. Democrats hold 56 of the 100 seats in the Senate.

Democrats have to watch their left flank too. If the provision is abandoned or weakened substantially in conference, the bill could run into trouble among House liberals, especially among members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus.

“I don’t think there can be a credible crime bill without the racial justice act,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles).

“I’d love to see the White House take a position and support it,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). “It’s going to be tough to pass a bill without it.”

Clinton has never endorsed the provision, keeping himself aloof from the controversy that has raged on Capitol Hill over this part of the bill.

Dropping the provision presumably would speed final approval but Clinton’s involvement in any such strategy would offend some of his most loyal backers in the House as well as the 38 Democrats in the Black Caucus.

“People underestimate what it will take to pass this bill,” said Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento), vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus. “We can’t rush to judgment (on the crime bill) even though we’d like to do it quickly.”

On other issues, the key Senate and House negotiators appear close to agreement on these provisions:

* $10.9 billion for state and local law enforcement over the next six years, including almost $9 billion to hire 100,000 police officers.

* $8.4 billion for state and local prisons.

* $7.6 billion for a variety of crime prevention programs, with an additional $1.4 billion for drug courts to encourage treatment of addicts rather than incarceration.

Times staff writer David Lauter contributed to this story.