Law: Death Wish Denied

An execution is stayed, but others may be on the way

On the day after Christmas 1976, John Louis Evans and a friend he met in prison, Wayne Ritter, rented an Oldsmobile Cutlass and went on a spree. By Evans' count, the pair committed 37 robberies, two extortions and nine kidnapings. When they got to Mobile, Ala., Evans shot a pawnbroker in the back while the victim's two daughters, aged 7 and 9, looked on. It was all a "deadly game," says Evans. "I was planning on dying. I would never go back to prison."

Last week Evans came within six hours of getting just what he planned for. Condemned to die, he had finished eating his last supper a few yards away from the electric chair in Holman prison near Atmore, Ala., when a last-minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court won him a stay of execution. Evans did not ask for it; his mother did. Evans had told reporters that his death would be the "one constructive, positive act in a blasted life."

Evans first made his death wish known at an unusual televised trial. Accused of murder and robbery, Evans and Ritter both threatened to murder the jurors, too, if they acquitted the pair. A shocked jury took all of 15 minutes to convict. Ritter lost his urge to die during the two years he has spent sitting on death row, and is still appealing his case. But Evans asked only that he be put to death by a lethal injection, so he could donate his organs to medicine (burning them by electrocution, he has said, would be a "waste").

Opponents of the death penalty appealed the death sentence four times, to no avail. Finally, last week, Evans' mother went to the high court. Justice William Rehnquist, a supporter of the constitutionality of the death penalty, somewhat grudgingly put off the execution to give the full court a chance to hear Mrs. Evans' arguments. When her son got the news, he wept and said, "I will have to go through all this again." At the earliest, Evans could go to the chair in mid-May.

Only one man has been executed since 1967: Gary Gilmore, who also asked to die, and was killed by a firing squad in Utah two years ago. But unless the law takes an unexpected turn toward leniency, a decade-long de facto moratorium on the death penalty may come to an end starting this summer. If so, many condemned men who definitely want to live will die.

As recently as 1972, it looked as if the death penalty would soon go the way of the lash and the rack. That year, in Furman vs. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment, as Justice Potter Stewart put it, "in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual." It had been applied "wantonly" and "freakishly"—most often against poor blacks. But four years later, the court approved new capital punishment laws designed by individual states to be less arbitrary. Typically, the laws allow juries to hand down a death sentence only after weighing "aggravating circumstances," such as the murder of a police officer or the torture of a victim, and "mitigating circumstances," such as a killer's age or emotional state. Now 35 states have the death penalty, and death row, emptied by Furman in 1972, has a population of about 500.