TV Review : Edifying, Entertaining Death Penalty Debate

“Firing Line,” William F. Buckley’s PBS podium for many years, has always taken different guises for different issues. When it tackles the knottiest issues, it takes on the most alluring guise of all--the group debate, when Buckley must share the podium with others. The latest of these, cheerfully titled “Resolved: The Death Penalty Is a Good Thing,” shows that on TV there’s rhetoric, and then there’s rhetoric.

Most TV-style rhetoric is pontificating. The rhetoric in this debate’s two hours is--or attempts to be--rhetoric’s original role as reasoned argument. It’s the difference on the right, for example, between Buckley and Rush Limbaugh.

But reason alone never persuaded anyone on a TV debate to change his or her mind, and that doesn’t happen on the Bard College stage, where moderator Michael Kinsley guides the clash between teams for and against capital punishment. Joining Buckley are Georgia Assistant Atty. Gen. Susan Boleyn, constitutional law scholar Walter Berns and former New York Mayor Ed Koch; on the other side are ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser, Bard President Leon Botstein and death row prisoner defense attorneys Bryan Stevenson and Stephen Bright.

The arguments come fast and furious, almost enough to hide the fact that both sides grant key points early on. While the pro-penalty group virtually concedes that capital punishment isn’t a proven deterrent to crime, the anti-penalty side barely tries to dispute the moral case that society has an interest in meting out grave punishment for grave crime.

Stevenson and Bright, having observed some questionable Georgia murder trials, both argue that the death penalty disproportionately falls on black murderers of white victims more than any other type of case. They argue--though it doesn’t really follow--that until punishment is color-blind, ban the death penalty.

Berns quietly brushes this aside, saying that if racism is the problem, then clean up the procedures, since bad procedures don’t negate the underlying values on which punishment is based. Unfortunately for non-Georgia viewers, Bright, Stevenson and the comically stern-faced Boleyn tussle too long over Georgia cases, though Boleyn is overwhelmed by Bright’s claims of that state’s pattern of racism in court.

More entertaining are Glasser (sharp and suave), Koch (surprisingly effective) and Buckley (taking a while to get his juices going), who aim at general ideas more than specific cases. Everyone indulges too much in a dizzying flurry of statistics, studies and scholarly babble, but they all finally raise the stakes of this profound social issue.

* “Firing Line Debate--Resolved: The Death Penalty Is a Good Thing” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28; 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24; 1 p.m. Saturday on KPBS-TV Channel 15.