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When Timothy McVeigh was on trial for the Oklahoma City bombing, a Denver radio station set up a checkpoint where people could honk their horns if they thought McVeigh was guilty and ought to be executed. In just a few days, over 24,000 Coloradans honked their judgment that McVeigh should be "fried." The enormity of McVeigh's deed knocked many death-penalty fence sitters off the rail: If ever there was a case in which capital punishment is justified, they thought, this is it.

But then, on the heels of the McVeigh trial, the case of Karla Faye Tucker upset the usual alignments on capital punishment (see p. 19). A Texas woman who killed two people with a pickax, Tucker was later born again and then executed for her crimes. Rich Cizik, policy analyst for the National Association of Evangelicals, said, "It's no secret that evangelicals have been stalwarts behind the death penalty." But Tucker's execution, he said, produced a "moral revulsion" among evangelicals "because she is a woman of such obvious spiritual change." This change led Pat Robertson and other conservative leaders to plead her case. "Any justice system that is worthy of the name must have room for mercy," said Robertson. Executing Tucker "is more an act of vengeance than it is appropriate justice."

Some of the usual death-penalty opponents were skeptical, saying such leaders would not be able to hold to that position for long. "Conservative voters will start to ask," said Samuel Jordan of Amnesty International, "'Well, if I think it's OK to commute the death sentence this time, is it just for women that we're doing this, or for male prisoners as well?'"

But Pat Nolan, senior vice president of Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM), predicted "a lot of conversations around the dinner table and hopefully in the pews. … I hope this will continue to be discussed and prayed about."

Conversation starter
As we continue this prayerful conversation, here are some things to consider:

The death penalty as it is practiced in this country is unfair and discriminatory. For those of us who support the death penalty as a moral abstraction, here are some troubling facts: On average, only one in a thousand murderers is executed. Race, class, and geography are the best predictors of who will get the death sentence for first-degree murder. If the victims are white and the perpetrators are poor minorities who commit their crimes in one of a handful of mostly southern states, their chances are greatest of receiving the death penalty. Nearly 90 percent of persons executed are convicted of killing whites, yet people of color are the victims of homicide in a majority of cases. Slightly over half of the executions since 1976 have been in Texas, Virginia, and Florida.

The legal resources available to poor people are woefully inadequate. The American Bar Association (ABA) cites examples of lawyers being assigned to murder cases who had just passed their bar exam or had no previous criminal trial experience, and instances where the defense attorney is paid only $800 per case with as little as $500 for expenses. "In case after case," an ABA report concludes, "decisions about who will die and who will live turn not on the nature of the offense the defendant is charged with committing, but rather on the nature of the legal representation the defendant receives." This unconscionable situation was exacerbated by get-tough-on-crime laws passed by Congress in 1996, which curtailed postconviction appeals and withdrew federal funding from organizations that support postconviction proceedings. Such uneven and inequitable application of death-penalty provisions prompted the ABA in February 1997 to call for a suspension of the death penalty. And former Justice Lewis Powell, the author of the 1976 Supreme Court ruling reinstating the death penalty, has said he regrets his involvement in that decision more than anything else during his tenure on the Court.

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April 6 1998, Vol. 42, No. 4