death penalty news June 3, 2004
USA: We should let life in prison be the ultimate penalty in American society By Michael A. Kroll San Francisco - The efforts of city police and a powerful California senator to make an alleged cop killer face the death penalty are ironically providing two strong arguments against the capital punishment that they demand. The first argument is this: As long as death is seen as "the ultimate penalty," then family and loved ones of murder victims will always feel disrespected if anything less results from conviction of a killer. The second argument: By giving politicians the chance to sound "tough on crime" by demanding the death penalty, the very notion of justice is threatened. David Hill, a young black man from Hunters Point, a violent neighborhood in the southeast corner of this city, is accused of shooting and killing police officer Isaac Espinoza on April 10. In this case, Espinoza's public family is his fellow San Francisco police officers. They have been loud and angry over city District Attorney Kamala Harris' vow to honor her campaign pledge not to seek the death penalty in murder cases. Despite the San Francisco Police Union's endorsement of Harris during her campaign, they now denounce her because, according to Police Chief Heather Fong, failing to seek the death penalty "dishonors the memory of all fallen officers and diminishes the lives of those, who, on a daily basis, risk their lives for the sake of the public's safety." Police say they feel "dishonored and diminished" because the alleged killer of a member of their family is seen as "getting off" by facing "only" life behind bars. Even in "good" years, as now, when the murder rate is considerably lower than it was a decade ago, more than 2,000 homicides occur in California annually. No one would advocate 2,000 executions a year to deal with this problem. Yet, as long as some of the convicted get death and others get life, some victims' survivors will always feel the system "dissed" them. The so-called "ultimate penalty" is generally reserved for the killers of those whom society values over others. The most prominent example: Executions are meted out to those who murder white people in vastly greater numbers than to those who murder black people, despite the fact that blacks account for approximately half of the victims of homicide. Blacks, Latinos and poor people in general might well feel dishonored, disrespected and diminished, since we seldom seek the "ultimate penalty" for their killers. But, while the local police seek respect through the execution of the alleged shooter, the civil-rights community seeks respect, too. Civil-rights advocates call for the abolition of the death penalty as the only way to guarantee that equally culpable killers be subject to comparable prison terms. If "the ultimate penalty" were life in prison without the possibility of parole -- which the district attorney has said she will seek in this case -- then no group of survivors could feel disrespected, dishonored or diminished by comparing penalties as grossly disparate as life versus death. As for the opportunity the death penalty provides politicians, California's senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, provides a perfect example. Though her duties are in the realm of federal law, she nevertheless pontificated on the subject of the appropriate penalty for a defendant not yet tried, but already convicted in the court of public opinion. Despite the fact that murder and the penalties for it are within the purview of state law (except in rare circumstances), Feinstein opined that this case exemplifies "the special circumstances called for by the death-penalty law." By intruding herself publicly into the controversy, the senator appears to throw the weight of her office behind a particular result in a particular case. One can understand the political motivation (and the emotion) that prompts her public remarks. But what about the risk to justice? How can Mr. Hill get a fair trial in a state where the top elected federal lawmaker already has told the people what the outcome should be? What potential juror, in San Francisco or elsewhere, will not have heard that his or her own U.S. senator has called for the death penalty in this case, and who among them will be unaffected by this knowledge? How can such an unwarranted intrusion into a state criminal case by a federal official advance the principle of "Equal Justice Under Law," those lofty words inscribed over the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court? Everyone who has lost a loved one to violent crime can understand the demand for the "ultimate penalty." But by drawing a bright line at life in prison as the ultimate penalty -- by eliminating the possibility of death as punishment -- we would eliminate the perception of being slighted, disrespected or dishonored by a system that seeks death for some but not for others. And, by taking capital punishment off the table as a possible criminal sanction, as most countries worldwide (including all of Europe) have done, we would remove a source of temptation to politicians to advance their own careers at the expense of justice itself. (PNS contributor Michael Kroll works with incarcerated juveniles who write for The Beat Within, a PNS project. He is the founding director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.) (source: Commentary, The Athens News, Ohio)
