Politicians, Voters and Voltage

By Richard M. Cohen

My family discovered the hulking wooden chair in the basement one summer morning about 25 years ago. The arms and legs were deeply scarred from the heavy metal apparatus once tightly fastened to it. It was, I announced to my parents' horror, the electric chair, liberated the night before from the ancient and abandoned Connecticut state prison. The Chair was too big a prize for high school kids to pass up. Sitting in it brought my imagination to life, as if I were its next official guest. My teenage sensibilities told me this was something people should not do to one another, and though my father did not think the escapade clever and made me return the chair to the prison that afternoon, my opposition to the death penalty had been formed. Years later, after I have lived more than a decade in the big city, been mugged at gunpoint, and developed, like most of us, a fear of violent crime, my simplistic and sympathetic notion of the murderer as victim has been tempered. My opposition to all killing has not.

George Bush is not opposed to all killing, especially when talk of frying people can help pull him out of the political fire. During the campaign, he scored big points with his tough stance on capital punishment. He supported it on the stump, in the debates, and through anticrime TV ads trumpeting his belief in the death penalty. The ads harped on Michael Dukakis' opposition to capital punishment, a position Dukakis was not shy about proclaiming anyway. The death penalty is a useful issue for any politician who believes that voltage wins votes. It works in a campaign, but on a different level, many Americans have clearly not come to terms with legalized killing. Politicians are not distinguishing themselves by the way they face this moral dilemma.

Take the case of Ronald Monroe, spared for a while by the state of Louisiana. Only Texas and Florida have put more people to death since 1977 than Louisiana. Monroe was convicted of murdering Lenora Collins in her bed one steamy summer night in 1977. Despite a lack of physical evidence and a jailhouse suggestion by a man in Michigan that he committed the crime, Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer has not acted on the recommendation of his pardon board that the sentence be commuted to life in prison. Instead, Roemer will wait to see if the courts get him off the hook before he makes a final decision. It will be a final decision. With the death penalty, guilty or not, there is no taking it back.

Whatever his personal beliefs, Governor Roemer will make that decision in a political framework. Beyond grappling with the haunting question "Did he do it?," the Governor will, inescapably, weigh the political fallout either way he goes. Once again, a capital case and a person's fate will be determined by a politician with a partisan agenda. In 1984 North Carolina Governor James Hunt was waging a fierce battle for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jesse Helms. Meanwhile, another political battle was raging. Velma Barfield, a matronly grandmother convicted of murdering her fiance while under the influence of drugs, was scheduled to be executed around election time. Barfield had won the sympathies of religious and political leaders all over the world because of the circumstances of the crime and her conduct as a prisoner. Despite pleas that her sentence be commuted so she could continue her Christian counseling work with fellow prisoners, she was put to death that November. It was commonly believed that failing to execute the woman would have had dire political consequences for Hunt in the race he lost anyway. When Ed Koch ran for mayor of New York City in the Democratic primary against Mario Cuomo in 1977, the cutting issue was the death penalty. Even though the mayor of a city has nothing to do with the administration of justice, Koch whipped up passions over the electric-chair issue as part of his toughness campaign and easily claimed city hall.

The court has said the death penalty is legal, but political leaders are reluctant to question whether we as a society want to put it to work. Public opinion studies, which have tilted both ways in the past 25 years, now show overwhelming support for the death sentence. Politicians who fan the fires are seeking heat, not light, and they make reasoned discussion difficult. Capital punishment tells us a lot about ourselves and our willingness to create a moral code that rises above destructive anger and the call for revenge in kind. We seem to have a double standard about death: it is wrong to murder, but killing in reprisal is O.K. For those who believe all murder, including executions, is wrong, it will never be acceptable for society to kill in our name. The trouble with eye-for-eye justice is that it legitimizes the taking of the first eye.

I believe there can be a formula for justice stopping short of taking human life that won't be dismissed by politicians as too liberal. There must be a method for treating violent criminals toughly, even harshly, that won't simply be tossed off as too conservative. There can be no forgiveness, no compassion for the criminal who kills. He should face a barren and hopeless life of incarceration. Perhaps the 50 states should, together, build a giant maximum- security prison in the desert. Reinvent Dante's Inferno. Let its inhabitants languish and be forgotten by all Americans. Just don't kill them for me. I don't want to be a murderer. Ted Bundy is dead. Would that he were sitting in an empty cell contemplating his crimes for the next 40 years.

Liberals have to understand that American patience with violent crime has been spent. Failure to deal effectively with crime has increased the public appetite for the death penalty. Conservatives must see that this society can be hard, even implacable, against criminals without killing them. If politicians will lower their voices and quit pandering to our worst fears and baser instincts, the search for common ground can begin.