Washington, DC, June 6, 1995 -- "This is a historic day, not just
for South Africa, but for the entire world community," said an ecstatic National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) President Gerald H. Goldstein,
of San Antonio, Texas, in praising what he called the "wonderful, beautiful
decision" of South Africa's Constitutional Court to outlaw capital punishment in
that country. Goldstein noted that the decision further isolates the United
States as the only Western country that still executes its citizens.
"The Constitutional Court has accepted what we know to be the case -- that
whether a particular defendant receives the death penalty is too often
determined by variables that have nothing to do with the defendant's criminal
behavior," Goldstein added.
In its February 1990 report, "Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates
Pattern of Racial Disparities," the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded
that available research "shows a pattern of evidence indicating racial
disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty . .
. ." in state courts. At the federal level, a March 1994 staff report by the
House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights concluded that "Racial
minorities are being prosecuted under the federal death penalty law far beyond
their proportion in the general population or in the population of criminal
offenders."
"We're still looking the other way in this country, even after retired
Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun publicly confessed last year that despite
20 years of legal tinkering, 'the death penalty remains fraught with
arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake,'" said James E. Boren, of
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who co-chairs NACDL's Death Penalty Committee. "The
injustices will only multiply as the federal government begins to apply the 50
new death penalties enacted by last year's crime bill and as states rush to
execute more convicts in response to the perceived public hysteria about crime,"
Boren added.
"It's dispiriting that as other Western countries are outlawing the death penalty, the U.S. is expanding its use," Goldstein commented. "The South African Court, in its decision, accepted the simple wisdom expressed by Clarence Darrow almost three-quarters of a century ago: 'If the State wishes that its citizens respect human life,' Darrow said, 'then the State should stop killing.'"
"Legislators who justify the death penalty on grounds of 'sending a message'
are blind to the real message of callousness and inequality that it sends to
America's least-advantaged citizens -- from among whom virtually all of those
actually executed come."
Even highly-respected Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau announced
earlier this year that "more than a century's experience has not produced
credible evidence that executions deter crime. The only honest justification for
the death penalty is vengeance," Morganthau wrote in a New York Times
essay, "but the Lord says 'vengeance is mine.'"
"NACDL and its members will persevere in opposing the death penalty in
Congress, in state legislatures, and in federal and state courts throughout the
land as long as this inhumane practice remains a part of the American justice
system," both Goldstein and Boren promised.
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
(NACDL)