Scotland on Sunday - Top Stories - Election hopefuls find no votes on death row

MAURO Barraza remembers nothing of the day he broke into Vilorie Nelson’s home, nor does he recall battering the 73-year-old with a pair of gardening shears, jumping on her chest to crush her heart and then slitting her throat.

Aged 17 at the time, he was pumped up on crack cocaine and, according to those who defended him at his trial, had been rendered temporarily insane as a result of an addiction to drugs and alcohol. He was sentenced to death.

Barraza, 32, hopes a last-minute stay of execution will save him from his scheduled appointment in the Texas state death house on Tuesday, a date that coincides with the 32nd anniversary of the historic US Supreme Court ruling that suspended the death penalty before its reversal four years later with the execution of murderer Gary Gilmore by firing squad.

Whatever his fate, anti-death penalty campaigners will mark the date with a rally outside the US Supreme Court building in Washington.

The long-running debate as to the rights or wrongs of the US’s capital punishment laws is one of the nation’s most prominent judicial controversies, with Hollywood liberals such as Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon fronting the abolitionist campaign.

But the issue is something both President George W Bush, a firm fan of the death penalty, and his Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry, who is opposed to it, are anxious to sidestep in the run-up to the November election.

"It’s not a good issue for either candidate," said David Elliott of the National Campaign to Abolish the Death Penalty. "It has the potential to hurt Bush with some voters because it cuts into the image that he wants to project of himself as a ‘compassionate conservative’.

"But it hurts Kerry a little bit too, because, sadly, we have still not reached a point when you can be a presidential candidate and be against the death penalty and not have it damage you. The death penalty remains very popular among the public."

A CNN/USA Today opinion poll conducted last month by Gallup showed 71% of the US public in favour of execution for murderers.

When the alternative sentence of life imprisonment is entered into the equation, however, the balance shifts; 50% of people said they preferred to see the death penalty imposed over life imprisonment, 46% preferred life. About half of those questioned believed executions were not carried out often enough; 23% said the penalty was imposed too often.

Abolitionists acknowledge that they are swimming against the tide, particularly in the wake of atrocities such as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, in which 168 people were killed, and the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Conscious of the strength of the public view, Kerry has qualified his opposition to capital punishment by declaring it acceptable when applied to terrorists.

By contrast, Bush’s decisiveness earned him the nickname of the ‘Texecutioner’ as governor of Texas from 1994 to 2000. He signed more death warrants - a total of 152 - than any other governor.

The death penalty debate is not split straight down party lines, however. Democrat Bill Clinton showed a certain fervour for executing murderers while governor of Arkansas before winning the 1992 presidency, as did his vice-president, Al Gore, during his own run for the White House in 2000.

And George Ryan, the governor of Illinois who famously emptied his state’s death row last year by granting clemency to all its inmates, is a Republican.

Attractive as Kerry’s sentiments are to anti-death penalty campaigners, he would have no magic key with which to unlock the cells of death row inmates en masse if he won the White House.

The states that operate capital punishment do so under their own state laws, not federal. He would, however, have the right to grant clemency to prisoners on federal death row, which currently houses 29 men.

Professor Michael Radelet of the University of Colorado, a death penalty scholar opposed to capital punishment, agrees that "there are things Kerry could do to soften up the situation" if he were president, including bringing more thoughtful and informed debate to the issue.

He might also "re-impose some kind of moral leadership and introduce the vocabulary of international human rights that under the present administration has been sorely lacking", as well as backing pending legislation giving inmates improved rights.

Crucially, any president gets to appoint the nine Supreme Court judges in whose hands the matter of life and death ultimately rests.

"I think we could hope for more liberal thinkers in the Supreme Court under Kerry," said Prof Radelet.

Topping campaigners’ wish-list when they head to Washington on Tuesday is the hope that the 74 death row inmates who committed their crimes as juveniles could be spared. The US Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty in its next session, which begins in October.

Dr John McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a proponent of the death penalty, is scornful of the fact that the pending review could mean stays of execution for all such inmates in the meantime, including Barraza.

"The law is the law and states should feel free to go ahead and exercise the punishment," he said. "You don’t get the death penalty for murder alone, you get it for murder with torture, murder with rape, and so on. Opponents say: ‘Gosh, at 17 these boys weren’t mature enough to make moral judgments.’ But they are old enough to join the army, old enough to drive."

Of the 50 US states, 19 retain the option to exercise the death penalty against juveniles convicted of murder. South Dakota and Wyoming abolished it this year.

But advocates say the death penalty is both a deterrent and a legitimate means of justice for victims’ families.

McAdams said: "If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers.

"If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former."

Crime statistics are black and white

RACE is a significant factor in death penalty statistics in the US, human rights watchdogs complain. But it is not that there are more blacks than whites on death row; the split was 45% white and 42% black at the beginning of 2004, according to figures from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Instead, the controversy lies in the fact that although blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers of crimes in the US, 80% of those executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 were for murders in which the victims were white.

"If you are black you are 40 times as likely to get the death penalty for your crime as a white," says Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer who has fought against the death penalty in America for two decades. "But it’s not so much because of the race of the defendant, but the race of the victim."

The death penalty Information Centre reports that 311 blacks have been executed since 1976, representing 34.1% of the total number of prisoners put to death. Around 13% of the US population is black. White defendants accounted for 57.2% of the total number of executions, while 82% of the US population is white.

Delivery formats for "Scotland on Sunday"