Death Penalty: A Horrifying Lottery

Conservatives have been pressing for reinstatement of the death penalty for federal crimes such as espionage and assassination of a President ever since the Supreme Court effectively struck it down 15 years ago. Now the Justice Department is lending its weight to the cause. In what critics see as an end run around Congress, U.S. attorneys are urging the U.S. Sentencing Commission to issue guidelines for the use of capital punishment that would be binding on federal judges.

But the opposition is building. Last week, before a session of the commission, Amnesty International USA sternly objected to reinstatement of the penalty. Amnesty Board Member John Shattuck, a professor at Harvard Law School, was asked by the commission's Benjamin Baer if the organization ever advocated the death penalty. No, replied Shattuck. "What would you do with a * prisoner who kills a guard?" Baer pressed. Answered Shattuck: "A long prison term might be appropriate."

In The Death Penalty, a 245-page study that was published last week, Amnesty characterizes execution in the U.S. as a "horrifying lottery" in which who dies is determined less by the crime that is committed than by politics, money and race. The punishment, according to the report, "remains both arbitrary and discriminatory."