REPRINTED FROM "MODELS FOR WRITERS" FIFTH EDITION:

        DEATH AND JUSTICE: HOW CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AFFIRMS LIFE
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                           Edward I. Koch

NOTE: Originally published in the New Republic, April 1985

        Last December a man named Robert Lee Willie, who had
        been convicted of raping and murdering an 18-year-old
        woman, was executed in the Louisiana state prison. In a
        statement issued several minutes before his death, Mr.
        Willie said: "Killing people is wrong...It makes no
        difference whether it's done by citizens, countries, or
        governments. Killing is wrong."  Two weeks later in
        South Carolina, an admitted killer named Joseph Carl
        Shaw was put to death for murdering two teenagers. In an
        appeal to the governor for clemency, Mr. Shaw wrote:
        "Killing is wrong when I did it. Killing is wrong when
        you do it. I hope you have th courage and moral strength
        to stop the killing."

        It is a curiosity of modern life that we find ourselves
        being lectured on morality by cold-blooded killers. Mr.
        Willie previously had been convicted of aggravated rape,
        aggravated kidnapping, and the murders of a Louisiana
        deputy and man from Missouri.  Mr. Shaw committed another
        murder a week before the for which he was executed, and
        admitted mutilating the body of the 14-year-old girl he
        killed.  I can't help wondering what prompted these
        murderers to speak out against killing as they entered
        the deathhouse door.  Did their newfound reverence for
        life stem from the realization that they were about to
        lose their own?

        Life is indeed precious, and I believe the death penalty
        helps to affirm this fact.  Had the death penalty been a
        real possibility in the minds of these murderers, they
        well have stayed their hand.  They might have shown moral
        awareness before their victims died, and not after.
        Consider the tragic death of Rosa Velez, who happened to
        be home when a man named Luis Vera burglarized her apartment
        in Brooklyn.  "Yeah, I shot her," Vera admitted. "She knew
        me, and I knew I wouldn't go to the chair."

        During my twenty-two years in public service, I have heard
        the pros and cons  of capital punishment expressed with
        special intensity.  As a district leader, councilman,
        congressman, and mayor, I have represented constituencies
        generally thought of as liberal.  Because I support the
        death penalty for heinous crimes of murder, I have sometimes
        been the subject of emotional and outraged attacks by voters
        who find my position reprehensible or worse.  I have
        listened to their ideas.  I have weighed their objections
        carefully.  I still support the death penalty.  The reasons
        I maintain my position can be best understood by examining
        the arguments most frequently heard in opposition:

        1. THE DEATH PENALTY IS "BARBARIC".: Sometimes opponents of
        capital punishment horrify with tales of lingering death on
        the gallows, of faulty electric chairs, or of agony in the
        gas chamber.  Partly in response to such protests, several
        states such as North Carolina and Texas switched to execution
        by lethal injection.  The condemned person is put to death
        painlessly, without ropes, voltage, bullets, or gas.  Did
        this answer the objections of death penalty opponents?  Of
        course not.  On June 22, 1984, the New York Times published
        as editorial that sarcastically attacked the new "hygienic"
        method of death by injection, and stated that "execution
        can never be made humane through science."  So it's not the
        method that really troubles opponents.  It's the death
        itself that they consider barbaric.

        Admittedly, capital punishment is not a pleasant topic.
        However, one does not have to like the death penalty in
        order to support it any more than one must like radical
        surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy in order to find
        necessary these attempts at curing cancer.  Ultimately we
        may learn how to cure cancer with a simple pill.
        Unfortunately, that day has not yet arrived.  Today we
        are faced with the choice of letting the cancer spread or
        trying to cure it with the methods available, methods that
        one day will almost certainly be consider barbaric.  But
        to give up and do nothing would be far more barbaric and
        would certainly delay the discovery of an eventual cure.
        The analogy between cancer and murder is imperfect because
        murder is not the "disease" we are trying to cure.  The
        disease is injustice.  We may not like the death penalty,
        but it must be available to punish crimes of cold-blooded
        murder, cases in which any other form of punishment would
        be inadequate and, therefore, unjust.  If we create a
        society in which injustice is not tolerated, incidents of
        murder - the most flagrant form of injustice - will
        diminish.

        2. NO OTHER MAJOR DEMOCRACY USES THE DEATH PENALTY.:
        No other major democracy - in fact, few other countries
        of any description - are plagued by a murder rate such
        as that in the United States.  Fewer and fewer Americans
        can remember the days when unlocked doors were the norm
        and murder was a rare and terrible offense.  In America
        the murder rate climbed 122 percent between 1963 and 1980.
        During that same period, the murder rate in New York City
        increased by almost 400 percent, and the statistics are
        even worse in many other cities.  A study at M.I.T.
        showed that, based on 1970 homicide rates, a person who
        lives in a large American city runs a greater risk of
        being murdered than an American soldier in WWII ran of
        being killed in combat.  It is not surprising that the
        laws of each country differ according to differing
        conditions and traditions.  If other countries has our
        murder problem, the cry for capital punishment would be
        just as loud as it is here.  And I daresay that any other
        major democracy where 75 percent of the people supported
        the death penalty (as they do here) would soon enact it
        into law.

        3. AN INNOCENT PERSON MIGHT BE EXECUTED BY MISTAKE.:
        Consider the work of Hugo Adam Bedau, one of the most
        implacable foes of capital punishment in this country.
        According to Mr. Bedau, it is "false sentimentality to
        argue that the death penalty should be abolished because
        of the abstract possibility that an innocent person might
        be executed."  He cites a study of the 7,000 executions
        in this country from 1893 to 1971, and concludes that
        the record fails to show that such cases occur.  The
        main point, however, is this.  If government functioned
        only when the possibility of error didn't exist,
        government wouldn't function at all.  Human life deserves
        special protection, and one of the best ways to guarantee
        that protection is to assure that convicted murderers do
        not kill again.  Only the death penalty can accomplish
        this end.  In a recent case in New Jersey, a man named
        Richard Biegenwald was freed from prison after serving 18
        years for murder; since his release he has been convicted
        of committing four murders.  A prisoner named Lemuel
        Smith, who, while serving four life sentences for murder
        (plus two life sentences for kidnapping and robbery) in
        New York's Green Haven Prison, lured a woman corrections
        officer into the chaplain's office and strangled her.
        He then mutilated and dismembered her body.  An additional
        life sentence for Smith is meaningless.  Because New York
        has no death penalty statute, Smith has effectively been
        given a license to kill.

        But the problem of multiple murder is not confined to the
        nation's penitentiaries.  In 1981, 91 police officers were
        killed in the line of duty in this country.  Seven percent
        of those arrested in the cases that have been solved had
        a previous arrest for murder.  In New York City in 1976 and
        1977, 85 persons arrested for homicide had a previous arrest
        for murder.  Six of these individuals had two previous
        arrests for murder, and one had four previous murder arrests.
        During those two years the New York police were arresting
        for murder persons with a previous arrest for murder on the
        average of every 8.5 days.  This is not surprising when we
        learn that in 1975, for example, the median time served in
        Massachusetts for homicide was less than two and a half
        years.  In 1976 a study sponsored by the Twentieth Century
        Fund found that the average time served in the United States
        for first-degree murder is ten years.  The median time served
        is considerably less.

        4. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CHEAPENS THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE.:
        On the contrary, it can easily be demonstrated that the death
        penalty strengthens the value of human life.  If the penalty
        for rape were lowered, clearly it would signal a lessened
        regard for the victims' suffering, humiliation, and personal
        integrity.  It would cheapen their horrible experience, and
        expose them to an increased danger of recurrence.  When we
        lower the penalty for murder, it signals a lessened regard
        for the value of the victim's life.  Some critics of capital
        punishment, such as columnist Jimmy Breslin, have suggested
        that a life sentence is actually a harsher penalty for murder
        than death.  This is sophistic nonsense.  A few killers may
        decide not to appeal a death sentence, but the overwhelming
        majority make every effort to stay alive.  It is by exacting
        the highest penalty for the taking of human life that we
        affirm the highest value of human life.

        5. THE DEATH PENALTY IS APPLIED IN A DISCRIMINATORY MANNER.:
        This factor no longer seems to be the problem it once was.
        The appeals process for a condemned prisoner is lengthy and
        painstaking.  Every effort is made to see that the verdict
        and sentence were fairly arrived at.  However, assertions of
        discrimination are not an argument for ending the death
        penalty but for extending it.  It is not justice to exclude
        everyone from the penalty if a few are found to be so favored.
        Justice requires that the law be applied equally to all.

        6. THOU SHALT NOT KILL.: The Bible is our greatest source of
        moral inspiration.  Opponents of the death penalty frequently
        cite the sixth of the Ten Commandments in an attempt to
        prove that capital punishment is divinely proscribed.  In
        the original Hebrew, the Sixth Commandment reads, "Thou Shalt
        Not Commit Murder," and the Torah specifies capital punishment
        for a variety of offenses.  The Biblical viewpoint has been
        upheld by philosophers throughout history.  The greatest
        thinkers of the 19th Century - Kant, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau,
        Montesquieu, and Mill - agreed that natural law authorizes
        the sovereign to take life in order to vindicate justice.
        Only Jeremy Bentham was ambivalent.  Washington, Jefferson,
        and Franklin endorsed it.  Abraham Lincoln authorized
        executions for deserters in wartime.  Alexis de Tocqueville,
        who expressed profound respect for American institutions,
        believed that the death penalty was indispensable to the
        support of social order.  The United States Constitution,
        widely admired as one of the seminal achievements in the
        history of humanity, condemns cruel and inhuman punishment,
        but does not condemn capital punishment.

        7. THE DEATH PENALTY IS STATE-SANCTIONED MURDER.: This is
        this defense with which Messrs. Willie and Shaw hoped to
        soften the resolve of those who sentenced them to death.
        By saying in effect, "You're no better than I am," the
        murderer seeks to bring his accusers down to his own level.
        It is a popular argument among opponents of capital
        punishment, but a transparently false one.  Simply put,
        the state has rights that the private individual does not.
        In a democracy, those rights are given to the state by the
        electorate.  The execution of a lawfully condemned killer
        is no more an act of murder than is legal imprisonment an
        act of kidnapping.  If an individual forces a neighbor to
        pay him money under threat of punishment, it's called
        extortion.  If the state does it, it's called taxation.
        Rights and responsibilities surrendered by the individual
        are what give the state its power to govern.  This contract
        is the foundation of civilization itself.

        Everyone wants his of her rights, and will defend them
        jealously.  Not everyone, however, wants responsibilities,
        especially the painful responsibilities that come with
        law enforcement.  Twenty-one years ago a woman named Kitty
        Genovese was assaulted and murdered on a street in New
        York.  Dozens of neighbors heard her cries for help but
        did nothing to assist her.  They didn't even call the police.
        In such a climate the criminal understandably grows bolder.
        In the presence of moral cowardice, he lectures us on our
        supposed failings and tries to equate his crimes with our
        quest for justice.

        The death of anyone - even a convicted killer - diminishes
        us all.  But we are diminished even more by a justice
        system that fails to function.  It is an illusion to let
        ourselves believe that doing away with capital punishment
        removes the murderer's deed from our conscience.  The
        rights of society are paramount.  When we protect guilty
        lives, we give up innocent ones in exchange.  When opponents
        of capital punishment say to the state, "I will not let
        you kill in my name," they are also saying to murderers,
        "You can kill in your own name as long as I have an excuse
        for not getting involved."

        It is hard to imagine anything worse than being murdered
        while neighbors do nothing.  But something worse exists.
        When those same neighbors shrink back from justly punishing
        the murderer, the victim dies twice.

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Comments, people?

Adam Bernay

Elect Dan Lungren California Governor in 1998