Death Penalty Opponents Cling to Unpopular Cause

As an outspoken agitator for one of the least popular causes in America--banning the death penalty--Maria Telesco is wearily accustomed to picking up her phone and hearing a barrage of angry abuse.

Some callers are extremists who accuse the retired nurse of being a Communist or even the Antichrist for her views; one threatened to burn a cross on her lawn. But others are reasonable people no less firm in their belief that execution is a just reward for society’s worst outlaws.

“There are days when you say, ‘I don’t think we’ll win this fight in this lifetime,’ ” said Telesco, 62, who leads a small band of capital punishment opponents in the Fresno area.

With the public overwhelmingly in support of capital punishment and states executing the condemned in record numbers, Telesco and other opponents of the death penalty are in the unenviable position of trying to spread their gospel in a nation that seems unreceptive, if not openly hostile.

Polls consistently show that Americans support the death penalty by large majorities. Utah prison officials were recently inundated with calls from people volunteering to take part in a firing squad for a convict who raped and strangled an 11-year-old girl. Virginia’s largest anti-execution group folded last year for lack of money.

“People often say to us, ‘You really seem to be attached to a losing cause,’ ” said Lance G. Lindsey, executive director of Death Penalty Focus of California, which opposes capital punishment. “It’s a very difficult time for us.”

Despite the unpopularity of their cause, “abolitionists,” as they call themselves, persist in attacking capital punishment as a costly, ineffective and racially biased abomination. And the country’s tough-on-crime tilt notwithstanding, they have scored some recent victories.

In Iowa, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and West Virginia, they helped beat back efforts to enact capital punishment. Membership in Death Penalty Focus of California is at a peak, with 10,000 on the rolls. After an outpouring of protest, Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar last month commuted the death sentence of a woman who murdered an abusive husband.

Moreover, committed grass-roots activists such as Telesco simply refuse to give up. Across the country, they continue to hold vigils outside prisons, write letters to newspaper editors and otherwise agitate for an end to government-sponsored killing.

Although she is afflicted with serious arthritis and heart problems, Telesco speaks often at churches and schools as head of the Fresno chapter of Death Penalty Focus. She compiles background material for students writing school papers about the death penalty.

Once a month, she gets into her aging car and visits a death row inmate at the state women’s prison in Chowchilla--a fellow ex-nurse Telesco once worked with. Until recently, she wrote an occasional column about capital punishment for a Fresno newspaper, the lightning rod for many of her telephone antagonists.

“I think I was born with this aversion to the death penalty,” said Telesco, who grew up near New York’s Sing Sing Prison. “Even as a little kid, I’d read about [executions] and become ill.”

Her group and others are organizing vigils and marches to protest the execution of “Freeway Killer” William G. Bonin, convicted of murdering 14 boys and young men in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Bonin is scheduled to die by lethal injection at San Quentin Prison at 12:01 a.m. Friday.

In Los Angeles, protesters will rally this morning outside the downtown Criminal Courts Building and tonight outside the Federal Building in Westwood. In San Francisco, they will march across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Quentin, where they will hear speakers including the son of the late Dr. Sam Sheppard, who was convicted but later cleared of his wife’s 1954 murder.

The movement has existed in America since the Revolutionary era, when reformer-physician Benjamin Rush campaigned against the death penalty as well as the evils of slavery and strong drink. But the movement’s numbers have always been small.

Its core activists are religious figures, defense lawyers, medical professionals and academics, with a sprinkling of Hollywood celebrities to help garner media attention. The president of Death Penalty Focus is actor Mike Farrell, a star of the “MASH” television series.

In the 1950s and 1960s, opponents waged most of their fighting on the legal front, hoping to win a knockout by persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down capital punishment.

They rejoiced in 1972 when the court invalidated most state death penalty laws, saying they were being imposed arbitrarily and violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Four years later, after some states rewrote their laws and set criteria under which judges and juries could mete out death sentences, the court ruled that executions could resume.

Since then, the court has handed the movement defeat after defeat. In 1987, it held that statistical evidence that blacks are sentenced to death more often than whites does not constitutionally taint the process.

Meanwhile, states have been executing prisoners at an accelerating pace. Last year, 56 condemned inmates were killed, the highest annual tally in 20 years.

That momentum has left many opponents discouraged and confused about how to advance their agenda.

“None of us is sure exactly what it is we need to do,” said Diann Rust-Tierney, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s capital punishment project.

At best, their work is emotionally draining. At worst, it is a crushing psychic burden that drives some out of the movement altogether.

Like Telesco, they face frequent scorn. They become experts on the depressing conditions of prisons. They strike up friendships with inmates only to see them die in electric chairs or on gurneys.

After losing so often in the Supreme Court, opponents in the late 1980s decided to stop trying to litigate the death penalty out of existence and instead took their case into Congress and other political arenas.

But there, too, they have been stymied.

Their central problem is that, unlike environmentalists or feminists, they have no natural mass constituency that could supply money and votes. Most Americans have little or no sympathy for those who would benefit most from an end to capital punishment, namely convicted killers.

In 1994, the movement lost its leading ally on the national political stage: Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York. Cuomo, who had vetoed death penalty bills in each of his 12 years in office, was defeated in a close race by a Republican who repeatedly ridiculed Cuomo’s position.

The same year, Congress voted to expand the number of federal crimes eligible for the death penalty from three to more than 60, despite strong lobbying by the ACLU and like-minded groups.

And last fall, Congress decided to eliminate federal funding for 20 “post-conviction defender organizations,” which provide legal help for condemned inmates.

Adding to the movement’s difficulties is the increasing reluctance of attorneys--including some abolitionist stalwarts--to handle appeals for condemned inmates. Of the 438 prisoners on death row in California, 125 are without legal representation.

Capital appeals are among the most trying cases a lawyer can tackle, financially as well as emotionally. They often drag on for years and pay fees--$95 an hour in state court--that lawyers complain are far lower than what they earn in many other cases.

And if they lose such cases, attorneys face the emotionally unsettling prospect of seeing their clients die.

In an effort to reach out to mainstream Americans, opponents in recent years have reframed their arguments against capital punishment.

They have begun arguing that the death penalty is costly and drains millions of tax dollars away from other crime-fighting measures such as hiring more police. A recent report by the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center said states have spent $670 million since 1976 on capital punishment, a period in which 314 prisoners have been executed.

But some activists are uncomfortable with the lessened emphasis on the movement’s traditional stance that the death penalty should be opposed on moral grounds.

Moreover, the new theme “just isn’t having any effect yet on politicians,” said Hugo Bedau, a prominent opponent who teaches philosophy at Tufts University.

Some activists are also troubled by another new position being advanced by their colleagues: that states should replace death sentences with sentences of life in prison without possibility of parole.

Despite the heavy odds against them, many opponents see reasons for optimism. Many believe the United States eventually will join Britain, Germany, France, Canada, Mexico and other nations that have banned capital punishment.

But that day will arrive, they say, only if the movement keeps pressing for an end to state-sanctioned killing.

“It’s sort of a one-little-candlelight thing you’re doing,” Telesco said. “But people do change their thinking.”

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