A Matter of Life or Death

If critics of the U.S. death penalty needed any more ammunition to prove that the system is unjust, flawed and unreliable, they got plenty last Friday. Five days before Timothy McVeigh was scheduled to die for a 1995 bombing that killed 168 people, the U.S. Justice Department postponed his execution until June 11. Reason: the fbi discovered thousands of pages of interview reports and other documents that were, inexplicably, never turned over to McVeigh's lawyers before his trial. While there was no indication that the documents would have changed the outcome — the defendant has confessed to the bombing — his lawyers demanded extra time to examine them and reserved the right to seek a retrial.

	Do you support the death penalty? Yes No Only in the case of heinous crimes like rape, murder or terrorism

That stunning development interrupted a process that had been heading smoothly toward a May 16 execution. It also added a baffling and embarrassing new example to the dozens of instances of judicial error, mendacious testimony, incompetent defense lawyers and sloppy lab work that have demonstrably sent innocent people to their deaths in recent years. Earlier this month, following an Oklahoma City Police Department report on multiple errors by local police chemist Joyce Gilchrist, the Oklahama State Bureau of Investigation launched an investigation into all the cases — including 23 death sentences — in which she has been involved.

It seemed unlikely that the newfound documents would reverse the verdict on McVeigh or long delay the execution that he himself has sought to hasten. But the news that law enforcement officials could mess up so spectacularly in such a high-profile case — involving the worst domestic terrorist act in U.S. history and the first federal execution in 38 years — seemed to prove once again that the American justice system was far from infallible. It also added an element of cruelty to the process, leaving McVeigh dangling in the wind and making the victims' families wait still longer for the "closure" that many hoped his execution would bring them.

If McVeigh's day does come, prison guards will lead him at 7:00 a.m. into a chamber at the Terre Haute, Indiana federal prison, strap him to a T-shaped gurney and insert an intravenous needle into his arm. McVeigh will pronounce some final words, then the chief guard will inform a U.S. Marshal, "We are ready." A dose of sodium pentothal will be sent through the IV line to render McVeigh unconscious and relax his muscles. Then a second drug, pancuronium bromide, will collapse his lungs. Finally, a lethal charge of potassium chloride will stop his heart.

Looking on from behind plate-glass windows, some two dozen witnesses — victims' relatives, journalists, lawyers — will observe the macabre spectacle from an adjoining room. In Oklahoma City, meanwhile, 300 others, mostly victims' family members, will see the death scene over closed-circuit television. And far beyond that, via indirect but doubtless vivid media and eyewitness accounts, the whole world will be watching. And judging.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, more than 700 prisoners have been executed in 31 states, and 3,700 are currently awaiting their turn on death row. That makes America the world's No. 4 executioner, behind China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. At a time when 108 nations have abolished capital punishment, legally or in practice, the U.S. remains the only major Western democracy to put prisoners to death. (Japan still does, but on a far smaller scale.)

There are moral arguments for and against the death penalty — thou-shalt-not-kill vs. an-eye-for-an-eye. But in America capital punishment is often accompanied by injustices and inequalities that are troubling even to those who support it in principle. Statistics show that blacks and Hispanics are proportionally far more likely to be sent to death chambers than whites; that poor defendants are condemned more often than rich ones; that the existence of the death penalty, despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, in fact has no deterrent value. The execution in some states of minors and retarded inmates is profoundly shocking to many people in the U.S. and abroad, as is the multiplicity of judicial errors that have sent innocent people to execution chambers or long terms on death row. The accumulation of such errors last year moved Illinois Governor George Ryan, a supporter of the death penalty, to declare a moratorium on executions in his state.

That the U.S. executes people is troubling to death-penalty opponents around the world. But nowhere, perhaps, does it pose such a problem as in the European countries that share America's democratic values and maintain close economic, military and cultural ties with their transatlantic partner. "Europeans are appalled at the unabated pursuit of the application of the death penalty in the U.S.," says Bianca Jagger, an official of Amnesty International U.S.A. "They cannot understand how the U.S. can claim to be the leading champion of democracy and continue to apply the death penalty." Belgian novelist and essayist Pierre Mertens similarly observes, "It is a tragic paradox that the deluxe country among the democracies resorts to this kind of barbarity."