Speech concerning the death penalty as morally wrong, 1985 May 10

Copyright Senator Julian Bond May 10, 1985

It is with some hesitation that I approach this audience tonight.

Your presence here indicates that you already stand with that body of Americans convinced that the death penalty is morally wrong, and that you share opposition to premeditated murder by the state, and that you intend to insure that Louisiana joins that minority of states that refuses to take human life.

My task, then, is to preach to the converted, and while I claim no special expertise in the this subject, I can claim particular credentials of time and circumstance.

I come from one of the four states - Florida, Texas, Ohio and my own Georgia - responsible for rolughly 70% of the death sentences imposed after the Supreme Court spoke in Furman vs Georgia 10 ¹³ years ago.

I come for the state which to date has executed more persons than any other, and has executed more women than any other. Georgia today houses more people on death row - 113 - than all but three states, Florida with 227, California with 168 and Texas with 193. More than 20 other prisoners in Georgia are awaiting new trials or new sentencing trials.

I come from the region of the United States where the death penalty is imposed most often.

And finally, I come form the state that gave the legal literature Furman vs Georgia, the 1972 Supreme Court decision that characterized the imposition of the death penalty as "freakishly rare," "irregular," "random," "capricious," "uneven," "wanton," "excessive," "disproportionate," and "discriminatory."

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In that case, the five-member majority held that the death oenalty was being used in an "arbitrary" manner. Because death is an irrevocable form of punishment, the Court said, arbitrariness in capitol punishment is a violation of the Eight Amendment prohibitions against "cruel and unusual" punishment.

Although two of the Justices in the majority - Brennan and Marshall - found death as a punishment constitutionally unaccpetable, the other three - Douglas, Stewart and White only objected to existing statues "as applied".

They death penalty is right, they said, but wrong in its application.

In reaction to Furman, state legislatures redrew their death penalty laws, making death mandatory for certain offences, and adding "guided discretion" statutes, designed to limit or control the exercise of discretion" by imposing explicit standards to be followed in the sentencing process.

The post-Furman statutes eventually produced Gregg vs Georgia in 1976, rejecting death penalty laws in Louisiana and North Carolina and upholding "guided discretion" as formulated by legislatures in Florida, Texas, and Georgia.

In Gregg, the court found that the new statutes which it upheld provided safeguards which should correct for the arbitrary and discriminatory application of the death penalty objected to in Furman.

"Should correct" is the operative phrase here. In fact, the supreme sanction's imposition remains as arbitrary today as it was before Gregg and Furman, and no less morally reprehensible than ever.

The moral, legal, statistical, and religious arguments against the death penalty remains as forceful today as they have always been.

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It cannot be condoned or justified on any basis, and yet there remains a sizeable body of opinions which insists that murder by the state is the correct response to murder by a man.

The death penalty does not serve as a deterrent. It is the product of a fallible system from which there is no appeal. Its application is based on arbitrary factory of race and place and on gross variation in the treatment of accused murderers at every step in the criminal justice process.

The race and social class of offender and victim and the geographical location of the crime intrude arbitrarily into the process of determining the severing of the sentence. The review process mandated by the Supreme Court has failed to correct these grevious flaws in a system which capriciously decided who shall live and who shall die.

Race, class, time and place - these are the inevitable biases of America's criminal justice system. It is a system in which race and class already determine life span and mortality rates, income and educational levels.

It is not possible, then, that the legislators of Massachusetts^Louisiana however skilled and compassionate, or the Bay State's ^its voters, however devoted they may be to justice and fair play, can devise a death system that is not hepelessly unfair, unconstitutional, and discriminatory.

Those voices - and, there are many - who insist on retribution by the state, or ritual murder as a lesson to potential murders, now must shoulder the burden of proving that a bias-free system can be constructed.

It has not been in any state among the 50, and cannot be so long as race and class distinctions persist and are given official status and sanction.

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Despite innumerable advances in human relations, race remains a powerful stigma in America in 1985.

The most powerful official in the world, America's President, professes not to know that segregated schools still exist, while daily he whittles away civil rights protections for women and minorities. While denying any bias of his own, he has constructed an economic program whose greates victims are black.

His first Secretary of State was a man, who when in the Nixon Administration, used to pound on the table with his palms like tom-toms when African affairs were discussed.

His Attorney Generals, in private practice and public life apologists and defenders of privilege, direct a Department of Justice more hostile to civil rights and civil liberties than any within recent memory.

If the nation's leadership, 200 and more years after our founding as a nation, persist in racist thought and action, can we expect lesser mortals to behave any better?

If we have had a purpose as a nation, it has been to create a society in which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are guaranteed.

The security of that guarantee cannot be maintained by its destruction. The taking of human life by the state is a worse offense against us all than the individual or mass murders which fill our newspapers.

But no state is committed, in reality, to executing all those who have committed capital crimes.

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They are committed instead to executing only those who are selected for death by circumstances of birth, byh their race, their poverty, or byh the happen-stance of having done murder in Central Georgia, rather than Atlanta, or of having killed ^a white woman instead of a black man.

According to Bowers and Pierce, a Bkack killer of a white victim is 40 times more likely, in Florida, to be put to death that a Black who kills another Black.

In Texas, a Black offender with a white victim is 87 times more likelu to receive the deatgh penalty than Blacks who kill Blacks.

In Ohio, a Black killer or killer, Black or white, who kills a white is more likely to receive the death penalty.

In Georgia, a racial hierarcy of victim and killer determines who will live and who will die.

In Florida, a death sentence in two-and-a-half times more likely in the state's Panhandle Region than it is in the Southern part of the same state; in Georgia, the death penalty is six times more likely in Central than in Northern Georgia, and less likely in Atlanta than elsewhere in the state.

At each stage in the process from the arrest to trial to conviction to appelate review, Bowers and Pierce assert, "(the) race of both offender and victim affects a defendant's chances of moving to the next stage."

Capital punishment, as presently applied in the United States, serves three important functions - minority group oppression, majority group protection, and repressive response.