"Let's Go"

Death comes to a Bishop

Dressed in a crisp white shirt and pressed Levis, he strode purposefully into the freshly whitewashed chamber at Nevada State Prison, near Carson City. "He looked as if he were ready to go to a disco," recalls TIME's Guy Shipler, one of 14 official witnesses. The man was then strapped into a metal chair, a long stethoscope tube poking out from his collar and snaking through a wall socket into a side room, where a doctor waited to monitor his heartbeat. At 12:14 a.m., a capsule of cyanide gas tumbled down a tube and plopped into a dish of acid. The man sniffed the air expectantly and shrugged nonchalantly. Seconds later, he grimaced and began breathing deeply. His face turned red and then his head dropped to his chest. At 12:21 a.m., the doctor pronounced the man dead.

Thus ended the life of Jesse Walter Bishop, 46, heroin addict and career criminal who committed his first armed robbery at age 15 and passed 22 of his last 27 years behind bars. With similar steadfastness, Bishop had denounced all efforts made on his behalf by civil libertarians to stay his execution for the 1977 murder of Newlywed David Ballard, 22, during a casino stickup in Las Vegas. Indeed, Bishop waived his right to a jury trial and immediately pleaded guilty to the killing.

When his public defenders attempted to argue that their client did not deserve a death sentence because of ''mitigating circumstances'' (Bishop won a Purple Heart while serving as a paratrooper during the Korean War and became hooked on heroin only after being administered morphine by medics for a battle injury), he promptly fired them.

Terming the death penalty ''an occupational hazard'' in his line of work, Bishop refused to authorize an appeal of his case even when given the chance to do so minutes before entering the gas chamber. Said he: ''This is just one more step down the road of life that I've been heading all my life. Let's go.''

Bishop is the third person to walk that road in the U.S. since 1967.* According to the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, 550 men and six women in 28 states now remain on death rows. Who may die next is uncertain, since none of the cases has yet exhausted its appeals. But opponents of the death penalty have little doubt that others will soon be executed, and that, though Bishop's case is unusual, his demise further hurts their cause. ''Each execution makes it easier to kill the next time,'' says former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who tried several times to dissuade Bishop from his course of action. But the killer argued that his execution might be so repulsive that it would weaken support for the death penalty.

Adds Clark glumly: ''I don't think he's right.''

*In 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah, and last May, John Spenkelink was electrocuted in Florida. Spenkelink, unlike Gilmore and Bishop, went to his death involuntarily.

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