The Law: Living on Death Row

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Many of those on death row live with a special anguish; they face execution for crimes that are no longer capital offenses in North Carolina. In 1973 the state supreme court ruled that for all crimes that once carried an optional death sentence, execution must now be the punishment. Then the state legislature passed a somewhat more lenient law, which last April changed the penalty to life imprisonment for arson, first-degree burglary and nonforcible rape. But the lawmakers did not see fit to make it retroactive.

Johnny Boyd, 37, learned of the new law while awaiting his sentence on a first-degree burglary conviction. He discovered that it did not apply to him because he had committed the crime before the statute was passed. Since then, he says, "every day has been the bottom pit of hell. I never get away from the fact that the chances are they may march me to that gas chamber."

Now the hopes of the condemned focus on the Fowler appeal. A tenth-grade dropout, Fowler, 26, was convicted of killing a man after a fight in July 1973. At his trial, he recalls, "I didn't know anything about the death penalty. I didn't believe that they would give it to a black man for killing another black man." Fowler has maintained a certain fatalistic nonchalance through his 14-month confinement. He wears a cap with the motto "Death Before Dishonor," and refuses cigarettes because "Smoking is hazardous to my health."

No one has been executed in North Carolina since 1961 or in the U.S. since 1967. In his appeal for Fowler, Attorney Charles Becton of Chapel Hill will argue that the death sentence not only violates prevailing standards of justice but is also still being capriciously applied. Fowler could just as easily have been convicted of manslaughter or second-degree murder, neither of which now carries the death penalty. "If they kill me," says Fowler, "it'll be nothing more than premeditated murder."