Running Out of Appeals

After years of legal wrangling, the pace of executions quickens

One way or the other, it was bound to be Alpha Otis Stephens' last night. First he tried killing himself, during his last lonely hours in a cell, by slashing at one wrist with a safety razor. He bled only a little. Then, just after midnight, the state of Georgia undertook to kill him. The 39-year-old murderer, looking scared, was strapped into the electric chair, electrodes fastened to his shaved head and shaved right leg. Superintendent Ralph Kemp counted to three, a volunteer executioner pushed a button, and 2,080 volts, 20 times the charge in a household socket, coursed through Stephens for two full minutes.

But when the electricity was shut off, the prisoner twitched. Then he gasped, and began breathing steadily. Stephens, although apparently unconscious, was not dead. According to Georgia execution procedure, five more minutes had to pass before a pair of prison doctors could examine him and certify that he was alive. "The execution has not been completed," said Kemp rather formally, "and will be reinstituted at this time." The button was pushed again, Stephens stiffened and, at last, stopped moving at all.

These days it takes a botched or otherwise unusual execution to grab public attention. Executions have become so frequent they are usually relegated to a couple of column inches on the inside pages of morning newspapers. From the end of the de facto ten-year moratorium on capital punishment in 1977 through last year, only eleven Americans were put to death legally. Stephens' execution last week, however, was the 20th this year. Not since 1963 have the states executed so many people. Next year the rate of executions seems sure to quicken, perhaps to one a week: by most reckonings, about 50 of the more than 1,400 inmates now on death row will be put to death. "There is no question that the system is gearing up," says Richard Brody, director of the anti-death-penalty project for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "But even if 50 people were executed next year, another 250 new convicts would probably take their place on death rows around the country."

Thirty-nine states have death penalty statutes on the books, and opinion polls find an overwhelming majority of Americans in favor of such laws. But the debate continues over whether the death penalty discourages would-be killers and whether it can be meted out fairly. The deterrent effect has never been proved, and the preponderance of expert opinion is skeptical. In the absence of conclusive scientific evidence, the argument has turned more on morality than efficacy. Proponents claim that the death penalty is the only punishment that truly fits the crime of murder; opponents insist that capital punishment is cruel, capriciously applied and unbecoming a civilized society.

Even some advocates of capital-punishment laws are uneasy about actually imposing the penalty. Oregon voters, who abolished the death penalty by referendum in 1964, reimposed it the same way last month, but only in cases involving wanton murderers who would otherwise pose a "threat to society." The Colorado legislature this year passed a tough new capital-punishment statute co-sponsored by State Senator Ray Powers. Even so, Powers declares, "we're just not a death-penalty state like, say, Florida, and this law isn't going to make us one."