Premeditated Execution

By HENDRIK HERTZBERG WASHINGTON

AS BEFITS THE NATION WHOSE SUPERMARKETS and shopping malls bedazzle visitors from less fortunate lands, the U.S. offers more variety in its ways of putting ! prisoners to death than any other country on earth. Under assorted laws in the 36 states of the union that mandate capital punishment, the condemned may die, in ascending order of frequency, by being hanged, by being shot by a firing squad, by inhaling cyanide gas, by electrocution or -- the newest method and a dog's death in more ways than one -- by being administered poison through an intravenous drip. Unlike at the mall, though, there isn't much choice at the retail level. Only Utah (shooting or hanging) and Idaho (lethal injection or firing squad) offer the customer a limited say in how he (death row's population is 98.5% male) goes.

In the 100 or so other countries that still punish by death, the technology of execution is simpler. A handful favor the headsman's ax or the even more ancient practice of stoning to death. The rest employ either the rope or the bullet, both of which have fallen into near total disuse in the U.S. Outside the U.S., capital punishment in the 1990s is usually associated with underdevelopment or lack of democracy, usually both. The death penalty no longer exists in any European Community country. Most of the nations of the former Soviet bloc have abolished it, and the rest are considering doing so. Of the 2,086 executions Amnesty International tracked in 1991, 1,859 took place in two countries: China and Iran.

Capital punishment is not an issue in Western Europe: there is virtually no agitation to bring it back. It is highly controversial in the U.S., of course, but far less so than it ought to be. There is no way to explain the opinion polls that show large and growing majorities in favor of the death penalty. Today 2,588 people pace the death row cells of America's prisons. Another joins them, on average, every day of the year. Fourteen died in 1991; 16 more have died so far this year. As the pace of executions mounts, so too, sooner or later, will the intensity of the debate.

Stripped to their essentials, the arguments for capital punishment remain what they have always been: deterrence and retribution. The first of these arguments is not hard to dispose of. Despite innumerable studies, no connection between murder rates and capital punishment has ever been shown. Of course, it stands to reason -- it's only common sense -- that the possibility of execution would give a potential murderer pause; but those who descend into the mental maelstrom of murder tend to be precisely those who have left reason and common sense behind.

The argument for retribution would be even easier to dismiss if it consisted only of a base thirst for revenge. But in its most sophisticated form, the argument is far weightier and more interesting than that. Society, writes Walter Berns, an eloquent defender of capital punishment, must manifest a terrible anger in the face of a terrible crime, for nothing less will suffice to "remind us of the moral order by which alone we can live as human beings."

This is a serious moral argument. Opponents of capital punishment must be willing to answer it on its own terms. And they do have an answer, which is that the death penalty demeans that same moral order. Execution is not legalized murder -- any more than imprisonment is legalized kidnapping -- but it is the coldest, most premeditated form of homicide of all. It does something almost worse than lowering the state to the moral level of the criminal: it raises the criminal to moral equality with the social order. Indeed, one of the ironies of capital punishment is that it focuses attention -- and, inevitably, sympathy -- on the criminal.

What is it like to be executed? If you die in the gas chamber, as Robert Alton Harris did in California on April 21, you may stay conscious for several minutes after the cyanide pellets drop, experiencing a terrifying sensation of strangling and sharp pain in the arms, shoulders, back and chest. If you die in the electric chair, as Roger Coleman is scheduled to do in Virginia on May 20, you will be literally burned to death internally -- and you will feel it, for many long seconds. Afterward, your body will likely be fouled by urine, feces and vomited blood. It will be too hot to touch for several minutes, and the smell of cooked flesh will permeate the execution chamber. If you die by the IV method, as three have in Arkansas since 1976, you may not experience much physical pain, merely the psychological agony of being strapped to a table while waiting to die.

The wait, of course, will have been longer than the half hour or so in the death chamber. Albert Camus compared capital punishment to "a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months." But on America's death rows, no one is that lucky. Most condemned prisoners spend years awaiting execution.

The Bush Administration and its allies on the Supreme Court, whose nine ! Justices are the nation's final arbiters of life and death, are eager to reduce such waits. Their aim is not to make capital punishment less terrible but to make it more routine. The catch, of course, is that every reduction in the elaborate legal process that has evolved to ensure that only the guilty die increases the chances that an innocent person will be subjected to this most irreversible and final of punishments.