NEW YORK – “Let’s do it.”
With those last words, convicted killer Gary Gilmore ushered in the modern era of capital punishment in the United States, an age of busy death chambers that will likely see its 1,000th execution in the coming days.
After a 10-year moratorium, Gilmore in 1977 became the first person to be executed following a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision that validated state laws to reform the capital punishment system. Since then, 997 prisoners have been executed, and next week, the 998th, 999th and 1,000th are scheduled to die.
Robin Lovitt, 41, will likely be the one to earn that macabre distinction on Wednesday. He was convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a 1998 pool hall robbery in Virginia.
Virginia Gov. Mark Warner is examining Lovitt’s case, and could decide whether or not to grant clemency over the weekend. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to reconsider the case in October.
Ahead of Lovitt on death row are Eric Nance, scheduled to be executed Monday in Arkansas, and John Hicks, scheduled to be executed Tuesday in Ohio. Both executions appear likely to proceed.
Gilmore was executed before a Utah firing squad after a record of petty crime, the killing of a motel manager and suicide attempts in prison. His life was the basis for Norman Mailer’s book “The Executioner’s Song” and a TV miniseries.
While his case was well-known, most today could probably not name even one of the more than 3,400 prisoners – including 118 foreign nationals – on death row in the United States.
The focus of the debate on capital punishment was once the question of whether it served as a deterrent to crime. Today, the argument is more on whether the government can be trusted not to execute an innocent person.
Thomas Hill, an attorney for a death row inmate in Ohio who recently won a second stay of execution, thinks the answer is obvious.
“We have a criminal system that makes mistakes. If you accept that proposition, that means you have to be prepared for the inevitability that some are sentenced to death for crimes they didn’t commit,” Hill said.
But advocates of the death penalty argue that its opponents are elitist liberals who are ignoring the real victims.
“Since 1999 we’ve had 100,000 innocent people murdered in the U.S., but nobody is planning on commemorating all those people killed,” said Michael Paranzino, president of Throw Away the Key, a group that supports the death penalty.
Race is a key question in the debate. Since 1976, 58 percent of those executed in the U.S. were white while 34 percent were black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But non-Latino whites make up 75 percent of the U.S. population, while non-Latino blacks comprise just over 12 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Some supporters say ending the death penalty would be harmful to poor minorities, who are disproportionately murder victims.
“Increasingly violent crime is primarily for the working-class folks, poor people and people of color,” Paranzino said.
Opponents of capital punishment also point to the unfair role of class and race in death-penalty cases. “There is tremendous arbitrariness to the death penalty. … the race of the victims has a lot to do with who winds up getting executed,” said Barry Scheck, co-founder of the New York-based Innocence Project, a legal clinic that seeks to exonerate inmates through DNA testing.
Death sentences nationwide have dropped by 50 percent since the late 1990s, with the number of executions carried out down by 40 percent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. An October Gallup poll showed 64 percent of Americans support use of the death penalty. But that is the lowest level in 27 years, down from a high of 80 percent in 1994.
Still, some powerful political forces are looking to speed up the trying and executing of prisoners. Both houses of Congress are considering bills that would lessen the ability of defendants in capital cases to appeal to federal courts.
Proponents of the legislation say such appeals add up to 15 years to the process of executing a prisoner. Detractors say the law will not allow federal courts to review most cases and will result in innocent people being put to death.
Since 1973, 122 prisoners have been freed from death row. The vast majority of those cases came during the last 15 years, since the use of DNA evidence became widespread. While there is no official proof an innocent person has been executed, opponents of the death penalty say the number of prisoners whose convictions have been reversed should fuel skepticism.
“I don’t think any rational person seriously examining the evidence can have any confidence that an innocent hasn’t already been executed,” said Scheck.
Using post-conviction DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has helped in more than half of the 163 cases vacated – 14 of which were from death row. “We’ve demonstrated that there are too many innocent people on death row,” Scheck said.
In St. Louis, City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce has led a review of 1,400 cases to see whether DNA evidence can prove the guilt or innocence of those convicted. With only 12 cases left to review, evidence led to the exoneration of just three men, none of whom were on death row.
“Most of the time there is testing, it confirms the guilt of the defendant,” Joyce said.
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