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Five Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published on February 18
BEAST IN GOLD
BRAID:
GENERAL PINOCHET
The General Turns
Out to Be a Coward.
When Police Knock
at His Door and Threatended to Slap Cuffs on him, Pinochet Fainted
EMINEM:
A Hired Gun from the
Poor Part of Town, Who Preys on the
Powerless, Extorts
Money from the Poor
and Celebrates a
Thuggish Brand of
Gangster Capitalism
BOVE OF MILLAU:
If There's One Organizer
Symbolizing the Worldwide Counterattack on Corporate Agriculture
It's Jose Bove
Published on January 30
THE TERRORIST'S
RETURN:
THE CRIMES OF SHARON
From Qibya to
Beirut:
Ariel Sharon's
Bloody Record
FAKING IT
Democrats Roll
Over on Ashcroft
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
They All Love
Anne Veneman
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Gore Gets More
Votes, Doesn't Care
What William Carlos
Williams Really
Thought About
The Beats
Published on January 15
BUSH PUTSCH
OKAYED
BY SENATE DEMS AND
BLESSED BY SUPREMES
More Scandals
of Squelched
Black Votes
Outside Florida
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
Nixon Protege Rumsfled
Returns
to Pentagon as
the Keeper of
the Trough
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Russia Nukes Itself
Deregulation in
Airlines and Energy
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New Stories:
CounterPunch Coverage
of Election 2000
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February 23, 2001
Gays,
Hate Crimes and the Death Penalty
Hate Versus Death
Almost every week, it seems, we get
to read about some state execution, performed or imminent, wreathed
in the usual toxic fog of various prejudices, or incompetency
of counsel, or prosecutorial misconduct.
Take the recent execution in
Ashcroft country, February 7, of Stanley Lingar, done in the
Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri, for killing 16-year-old
Thomas Allen back in 1985. In the penalty phase of Lingar's
trial, prosecutor Richard Callahan, who may now be headed for
a seat on the Missouri State Supreme Court recently vacated
by his mother in law, argued for death, citing Lingar's homosexuality
to the jury as the crucial factor that should tilt poison into
the guilty man's veins. Despite the on-the-record anti-gay bias,
Governor Bob Holden, a Democrat, turned down a clemency appeal
and told the press he'd "lost no sleep" over signing
off on Lingar's fate.
Is there any hope that the
ample list of innocent people either lost to the executioners
or saved at the eleventh hour will prompt a federal moratorium
such as is being sought by Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin?
Or that states will suspend or, better still, end the death
penalty? Or that judges will decline to impose this cruel and
unusual punishment?
A year ago it seemed possible. On January
31, 2000, Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican, suspended
imposition of the death penalty in his state on the grounds
that he could not support a system "which, in its administration,
has proven so fraught with error." In the months that followed
Ryan's commendable decision abolitionists took comfort from
a number of polls that the tide of public opinion was beginning
to turn.
By June a Field Poll reported
the sensational finding that in the state with the most crowded
death row in the nation, Californians by nearly 4 to 1 favored
stopping state executions to study how the death penalty was
being applied. The Field poll respondents were told about wrong
convictions, also about appeals to Governor Gray Davis by religious
leaders for a moratorium. Polling in California at the end of
last year, without the background used by Field, put support
for a moratorium at 42 percent, just behind those opposed to
any such move. A national poll last fall found 53 per cent for
a moratorium.
The discrepancy in the California
polls actually affords comfort to abolitionists, since it shows
that when respondents are told about innocent people saved from
lethal injection, often at the last moment, support for a moratorium
soars. It's a matter of public education.
But where are the educators?
Many eligible political leaders have fled the field of battle,
convinced that opposition to the death penalty is a sure-fire
vote loser. In the second presidential debate last fall Al Gore
wagged his head in bipartisan agreement when George W. Bush
declared his faith in state executions as a deterrent.
A few years ago Hillary Clinton
spoke of her private colloquies with the shade of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Mrs. Roosevelt's passionate opposition to the death penalty
either did not come up in their conversations or left her unpersuaded,
since now-Senator Clinton stands square for death, as does her
husband, as does New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer.
Indeed the death penalty is no longer
a gut issue, or even a necessary stand, for those, like Schumer,
who are associated with the Democratic Party's liberal wing.
On February 12 the New York Post quoted Kerry Kennedy Cuomo,
long known as a leading death-penalty opponent, as saying that
"it would be futile" to try to repeal capital punishment
in New York.
Mrs. Cuomo, daughter of Robert
F. Kennedy, told the Post that she believes her husband, Andrew,
a contender for the Democratic nomination for governor, shares
her views. "To tell you the truth, on the death penalty,
it's not as big an issue in the state as it was a few years
ago." In the Post account, Mrs. Cuomo didn't mention her
father-in-law, Mario, who repeatedly vetoed death-penalty measures
during his 12 years as governor.
In line with Kerry Kennedy
Cuomo's spineless stance, many liberal or what are now cautiously
called "human rights" groups have also found it politic
to sideline capital punishment as an issue. No better illustration
is available than the recent tussle over John Ashcroft's nomination
as Attorney General. Scores of groups flailed at him on choice,
homophobia, racism and hate crimes, but not on the most extraordinary
application of hate in the arsenal of state power: the death
penalty.
Return for a moment to the
fight to save Lingar's life. Privacy Rights Education Project,
the state-wide Missouri gay lobby group, endorsed Holden in
his gubernatorial race. PREP, however, was quite muted on Lingar's
fate, taking little action except sending a one-paragraph letter
to the governor the day before the execution. Another gay organization,
the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the folks who
want to shut down Dr. Laura, is a national group but happens
to have an office in Kansas City, MO. Surely what prosecutor
Callahan did to Stanley Lingar is well beyond defamation. Where
was GLAAD on this case? Not a peep from them. Noisy about hate
crimes but similarly silent on the death penalty is the inaptly
named Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay advocacy
group. To their credit, Amnesty International, ACLU, Missourians
to Abolish the Death Penalty and Queer Watch were there in the
Misssouri trenches, trying to save Lingar's life.
The issue of capital punishment
is drawing much more attention these days. Just when help could
really make a difference, where are all these (ostensibly) liberal
and progressive groups? The Anti-Defamation League (okay, strike
"ostensibly"), whose national director, Abraham Foxman,
pulled down $389,000 in 1999, was busy writing letters for
Marc Rich. Why? Its position on capital punishment? The ADL
backed Bill Clinton's appalling Antiterrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act of 1996 which eviscerates habeas corpus review
for prisoners on death rows across the country. People for the
American Way? Not a bleat about the death penalty, though now
launching an 18-state campaign for hate crimes legislation.
The impetus given by Ryan last year
could fall apart. Governor Ryan himself faces very difficult
reelection prospects in 2002, and a successor could rescind
the moratorium. Liberals should abandon their absurd and dangerous
obsession with hate crime laws and muster against this most
hateful excrescence on the justice system - capital punishment.
Let them take encouragement
from the District Attorney of San Francisco, Terrence Hallinan,
who told a San Francisco Court on February 6 that he would not
participate in the capital sentencing of one Robert Massey
since "the death penalty does not constitute any more of
a deterrent than life without parole" and, among other
evils, "discriminates racially and financially, being visited
mainly on racial minorities and the poor.... It forfeits the
stature and respect to which our state is entitled by reducing
us to a primitive code of retribution." CP
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