Death penalty warmed over

By Bill Steigerwald

The death-penalty issue, always contentious and never far from the
national consciousness, shot onto the front pages of Time and Newsweek
this week.

It was all because George W. Bush, the sitting governor of “The Great
Death Penalty State” of Texas, granted an especially unsavory death row
resident of his state a 30-day reprieve pending DNA tests. With 87
people released from death row because of evidence problems and
governors across the land examining their states’ capital punishment
procedures, the issue was already hot.


Time’s
five-page treatment is headlined “Death on Hold.” It gets its weight from a gallery of mugshots of 16 convicted killers from Texas that includes brief descriptions of their hideous crimes and their scheduled execution dates. It focuses mostly on how Bush made the decision and whether, duh, it was only a smooth political ploy to stress the compassionate side of his conservatism.

Newsweek’s cover piece,

“Rethinking the Death
Penalty,”
does a much more thorough and interesting job of reporting on the growing national uneasiness, especially among conservatives, about our inability to fairly and accurately put the right bad people to death.

The package includes a death-penalty time line and some statistics from Amnesty International that show we are in fifth place in the global executions race, trailing four unsavory countries no freedom-loving American would want to live in as a citizen for a week.

We fried, gassed and poisoned 98 humans in 1999, which places us far behind China’s world-leading 1,077. We’ll never catch China, which has the unfair advantage of being a totalitarian state with four times our population.

And our 38 state governments who employ the death penalty can’t kill at the rate of Iran’s second-place total of 165. But we’re within easy striking distance of Congo (100) and Saudi Arabia (103), another pair of lovely countries proponents of state-performed murders ought to be proud to be associated with.

Newsweek also explains how DNA tests work, looks at five death-row cases that are shaky and offers a powerful essay in favor of the death penalty by Marc Klaus, the father of 12-year-old victim Polly Klaus.

Klaus explains why he wants be present to look Polly’s murderer in the eye as he is put to death. Many others — 73 percent of the public — still tell pollsters they are in favor of the death penalty.

As proof of how some conservative hard-liners are having second thoughts, Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights tells Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter that “There seems to be growing awareness that the death penalty is just another government program that doesn’t work very well.”

That is a good synopsis of the strong anti-death penalty case made by Carl Cannon in National Review’s June 19 cover story, “The Problem With the Chair.”

Cannon, who mixes his own experiences as a crime reporter with recent developments in Illinois that resulted in 13 death-row prisoners being cleared of murder charges there, is a reporter and essayist for National Journal.

“The right question to ask,” he argues, “is not whether capital punishment is an appropriate — or a moral — response to murders. It is whether the government should be in the business of executing people convicted of murder knowing to a certainty that some of them are innocent.”

Cannon is certain that Illinois is not an aberration. And he says conservatives, especially, should be among the first to realize that truth.

“If ideology and experience lead one to the conclusion that government is by nature inefficient and inept, then why should it be astonishing that the actions of one branch of government — the judicial branch — are so routinely wrong?”

Cannon acknowledges that most of the time those who are condemned are guilty. But in the real world, he says, it is also inevitable that innocent people will be put to death.

“Murder is a terrible crime,” he says. “And in the face of the awful truth presented to us by DNA testing, what name shall we call the state-sanctioned killing of an innocent man? That’s why society must not be a party to it.”

Quick reads
Everyone knows by now that Elian Gonzalez will soon be back in Papa Fidel’s warm embrace. But if you want the details on how the INS twisted its own rules and procedures to grab Elian from his relatives, and how Washington’s power crowd cheered the INS on the whole while, check Byron York’s “Illegal Elian” in the June

American
Spectator.

Prior to its successful capture of Elian, the INS has been ripped for its gross mismanagement and its propensity to sweep up dangerous gangs of illegal-immigrant dishwashers and farm workers for PR purposes.

But thanks to a show of force fit for capturing a narco-terrorist in his own compound, “Operation Reunion” was an extralegal success that any Third World thugocracy could be proud of. York says the lasting lesson of Elian’s stay in the Land of the Free will probably be the repercussions from all the lawsuits that will be filed by citizens who were shoved around, pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed.

It’s not very funny, but in the June 19

Nation
Al Franken — comedian, NFL football fan and author of “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot” — begs ABC not to let Rush Limbaugh do Monday Night Football broadcasts. Much more rewarding is Eric Alterman’s always good media column, “Full Court Press.”

Alterman is one of the left’s best and punchiest writers. He is particularly pleased to note that the Pentagon/military establishment is under fire on three journalistic fronts:

The AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning report on an alleged massacre in Korea in 1950; Newsweek’s exclusive on the worthlessness of the air war in Kosovo; and Sy Hersh’s 34-page New Yorker investigation of an alleged massacre in a battle in the Gulf War by U.S. troops under the command of Gen. Barry McCaffrey, now America’s overzealous Drug Czar.

And, finally, a happier/fluffier note:

Men’s
Journal
for July isn’t posted on the Web yet, but it has an excellent cover profile of story on George Clooney, the regular-guy’s guy who is starring in “The Perfect Storm.”

The $120-million movie based on Sebastian Junger’s meteorological horror story about a huge storm that wiped out a swordfishing boat and its six crewmen is coming to a milliplex near you June 30. For the behind-the-scenes story of how it was made, see

Outside’s
June cover piece, “Building the Perfect Storm.”

It details how a 72-foot mockup of the doomed fishing boat was placed in a 1.3 million-gallon tank in a Hollywood sound stage. Clooney and the other actors were then rocked, rolled and pounded mercilessly by water driven by huge wave and wind machines. The fake super-storm is so realistic, the producers are a little worried their special-effects will steal the show from the actors, the way the fake tornadoes did in “Twister.”

Bill Steigerwald

Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and writer at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He has written a weekly column about magazines for the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Trib since 1987. Read more of Bill Steigerwald's articles here.