1-20-06, 9:45 am

As someone who has for years been a faculty advisor to a group at Rutgers campaigning for a death penalty moratorium, I was very happy that New Jersey's legislature had the courage to establish a death penalty moratorium, although Tom Kean, a state legislator, son of the former governor and 9/11 Commission Chair, and likely Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, voted against the moratorium.

Meanwhile in California, a blind man in a wheelchair was executed at the age of 76. Tookie Williams, a former LA street gang leader, was executed a few weeks ago after decades on death row in spite of an international campaign of protest. This campaign included the town council of of Graz, Austria, Arnold Schwarzenegger's home town, where a coalition of Social Democrats, Communists and Greens, representing a majority, took Schwarzenegger's name off a 15,000 person sports stadium over the opposition of the conservative mayor, who boasted that he was the Sacramento Terminator's personal friend. The Mayor, while blaming the Left for dishonoring Arnold, did make it clear that he too was against the death penalty, as most Europeans, even those on the right, are. In the U.S., there are very, very few elected Communists, Social Democrats, or Greens (the latter being the largest in number among the three) who could begin to create a true political spectrum diverse enough to produce the kind of serious political debate that would compel even conservatives to accept and endorse programs like the abolition of the death penalty, reform of the penal code, and the establishment of system of a government-funded national healthcare system such as those that exist in Canada and Europe.

Most Europeans see the continuation of the death penalty in the U.S. as barbaric and uncivilized and they are certainly right. The barbaric nature of the death penalty is an important part of the right wing’s campaign to numb and brutalize American public opinion, so that it is willing to accept the kind of dog-eat-dog form of unregulated capitalism that Upton Sinclair defined a century ago in his novel, The Jungle.

The death penalty is part of a culture of punishment and violence associated everywhere with repressive societies and regimes. The wide use of the death penalty in socialist and formerly socialist countries has for generations been a staple of the anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda employed to discredit these countries in the eyes of progressive people.

Over the last 30 years the use of the death penalty has been massively expanded in the U.S., while it has been abolished in the developed capitalist world.

In the U.S. the death penalty was illegal from 1972 to 1976, after the Supreme Court declared it to be a 'cruel and unusual punishment.' In 1976, a more conservative court ruled that states had the right to re-institute the death penalty, and a legion of right-wing politicians in both parties, running against the 'permissiveness' of the 1960s, stampeded to do just that.

When a Jack-the-Ripper-style lunatic roamed around New York city shooting young people in the summer of 1977, the consummate political opportunist, Ed Koch, long regarded as a liberal and running for mayor against progressive opponents, cornered the right-wing market by endorsing the death penalty. Later one Texas gubernatorial election came to national attention when both candidates ran ads proclaiming they would execute more prisoners than the other if they won. In ruling against plaintiffs, who claimed, based on massive evidence, that the death penalty was applied to African Americans in far greater numbers for comparable crimes than to white defendants, the Supreme Court in the Reagan years actually contended that such discrimination permeated the whole criminal justice system, and that if the death penalty were eliminated for that reason, many other legal penalties meted out by the judicial system would have to be revised. The Court was in essence maintaining that since African Americans are much more likely to receive the death penalty simply because they are African American, they should be executed anyway, in order to maintain the integrity and efficiency of the entire criminal justice system, which would grind to a halt if it could not operate in an institutionalized racist way.

When the Nazis (Arnold Schwarzenegger's father, remember, was a member of the Nazi Party in Austria before Hitler annexed the country in 1938) came to power in Germany in 1933, they re-instituted beheading as a way to express their detestation of the liberal Weimar Republic as they proceeded to burn Marxist books, terrorized the Jewish minority without any legal restraints, and built concentration camps for their political opponents, primarily Communists and Social Democrats. They reveled in a cult of violence as they prepared the German people, particularly young German males, to see war, particularly a war to defend 'Nordic Aryan Western Civilization' against the 'mongrelized Judeo-Bolshevik hordes' of the Soviet Union and the 'degraded' Slavic peoples of East Europe, as the highest, noblest ideal that human beings could aspire to.

The Nazis and other fascists also instituted a two-tier criminal justice system in which ordinary people routinely received very harsh penalties for minor crimes while fascist bigwigs and their wealthy supporters could violate the laws with the same impunity the Enron executives did. Even though the fascists advocated state capitalism and big government acting in partnership with big business, with workers kept in line under fascist-controlled labor organizations, the distinction between their glorification of state power in a privately-owned capitalist economy, and the practice of Bush and other right-wing administrations of expanding repressive state power, while condemning big government and advocating 'free markets' and entrepreneurship may increasingly be a hollow distinction.

In the U.S., the death penalty is part and parcel of a two-tier criminal justice system which has placed over 2 million people in prisons and jails by means of draconian drug laws which prosecute users, particularly minority users, while the big dealers buy protection and rake in super profits; a system that arrests and deports illegal immigrants while doing nothing to penalize the businesses that hire and exploit them; a system with huge disparities between states in terms of harshness of sentences for the same crimes, and one in which Enron and WorldCom executives, when they get caught, (and we should remember that in our massively deregulated economy a great many others never do) can evade sentences by plea-bargaining, or at least seriously reduce their prison sentences through legal maneuvers.

In the former Soviet Union, individuals who committed major economic crimes (embezzling large amounts of public funds, etc.) were sometimes given the death penalty. While I in no way would advocate such punishment anywhere, I sometimes wonder that if such a policy existed here, the death penalty might rapidly lose support among the corporate leaders who fund the rightwing politicians who defend and expand it.

The death penalty simply has no place in a civilized nation. That is understood in all advanced countries from Great Britain to Japan. It is actively understood by many millions of Americans. Its elimination in the U.S., through legislation that would restore and make permanent the Supreme Court's temporary 1970s ban, should be major goal for progressive activists in U.S. politics. Most of all, getting rid of the death penalty will help alter the mindset that sees violence as the answer to violence, punishment without limits as society's first line of defense, and is almost totally blind to the possibilities of rehabilitation and reform.



--Norman Markowtiz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.