[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 97 (Friday, July 22, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 22, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                         STATISTICS AND JUSTICE

  Mr. D'AMATO. Mr. President, I offered an amendment on Thursday, May 
12, 1994, that expressed the sense of the Senate that the conferees on 
the crime bill, H.R. 3355, should totally reject the so-called Racial 
Justice Act. The Senate adopted my amendment by a vote of 58 to 41.
  In recent weeks, we have seen much maneuvering as proponents of the 
use of statistics to block imposition of the death penalty on convicted 
killers struggled to keep that provision in the crime bill conference 
report. The White House has lobbied many who voted for my amendment, 
asking them to change their minds. According to published reports, the 
White House was not persuasive.
  Proponents have apparently floated various different versions of this 
provision, described as compromise language. I have seen several of 
those so-called compromise drafts, and all are unacceptable. They all 
retain the main flaw in the original provision--they allow convicted 
killers to use statistics about what happened in other criminal cases 
to block imposition of the death penalty on them.
  This core concept of the so-called racial justice act is what the 
Senate rejected--the disconnection between the individual and the 
crime. The most basic concept in criminal justice is that the 
punishment must fit the crime. This provision, if adopted, would 
shatter the foundation of our entire criminal justice system, not just 
make death penalty administration subject to racial quotas.
  In today's New York Post, Ed Koch, my friend the former mayor of New 
York City, has a column entitled ``Many flaws in racial argument 
against execution.'' In this column, he analyzes and rebuts many of the 
contentions of supporters of the so-called racial justice act. He 
points out some of the games supporters of the provision have played 
with numbers. I commend this column to my colleagues, especially those 
who may be tempted to support some compromise on this issue.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this Ed Koch column be 
printed in the Record immediately following my remarks.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

            Many Flaws in Racial Argument Against Executions

                              (By Ed Koch)

       Last Friday, The New York Times demanded that President 
     Clinton ``take a stand for racial justice in administering 
     the death penalty.'' They were calling for the president to 
     support the mislabeled racial-justice act as part of the 
     crime bill.
       The Times' editorial disingenuously went on to say, ``The 
     racial-justice bill would permit convicted murderers in some 
     jurisdictions to show a pattern of racial bias in sentencing 
     those eligible for the death penalty. It would not be enough 
     to show that black defendants suffer more than their 
     population's share of executions, which is generally true but 
     not at issue.''
       The United States Supreme Court has rejected the racial-
     bias argument. In McClesky vs. Kemp, it ruled that 
     statistical evidence covering all murder sentences in a 
     jurisdiction could not support a charge of discrimination in 
     a particular case. Every case is different with respect to 
     the aggravating and mitigating circumstances required to be 
     considered by each separate jury. How could it be otherwise, 
     since the evidence the jury considers in each case is 
     different, as are the jurors themselves?
       In its PC editorial, the Times tries to convey to those not 
     familiar with the facts that our justice system is 
     disproportionately and, therefore, unfairly sentencing and 
     executing black murderers.
       But, rather than looking at executions based on population 
     totals, shouldn't the Times be looking at who commits the 
     crimes? Forty percent of those executed since 1977, when the 
     death penalty was resumed, have been black, and 55 percent 
     have been white. In 1992, 55 percent of the murders in this 
     country were committed by black perpetrators.
       If you press an opponent of the death penalty who seeks to 
     make the erroneous argument that more blacks are executed 
     than whites, they will ultimately confess that what they 
     really mean is that fewer murders of black victims are 
     executed than are murderers of white victims.
       To satisfy such an argument, one should demand that more 
     blacks be executed than is currently the case, since blacks 
     are overwhelmingly murdered by other blacks. We know no 
     opponent of the death penalty would favor that even though it 
     is a logical extension of his or her argument.
       Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), a prominent member of the 
     Congressional Black Caucus and a leading sponsor for the so-
     called racial-justice act, was quoted in early May in the 
     Times as saying, ``Since 1976, of the 236 executions for 
     murder and the 2,800 inmates now on death row, blacks account 
     for 40 percent, while they account for only 12 percent of the 
     nation's population.''
       In effect, Conyers is for execution by quota. Implicitly, 
     he apparently is saying that the death penalty, like the many 
     other affirmative-action programs he favors, should also be 
     ruled by the numbers.
       Noted columnist William F. Buckley illustrated the 
     absurdity of such arguments during a recent ``Firing Line'' 
     debate on the death penalty in which I participated. Buckley 
     said. ``Consider Japanese-Americans. They kill practically 
     nobody * * * That means that if, to use round figures, there 
     are 1 million Japanese, 20 million blacks, 200 million 
     whites, that unless on execution day we have in mind one 
     Japanese convicted to death, 20 blacks and 200 whites, you 
     can't execute anybody. Proponents of capital punishment are 
     going to end up having to bribe Japanese to kill more people, 
     to say nothing of whites.''
       To make their case, death-penalty opponents like Conyers 
     and Rep. Don Edwards (D-Calif.) point to the fact that, our 
     of the 37 defendants selected by Attorney General Janet Reno 
     and other members of the Justice Department to be subject to 
     the death penalty under the 1988 drug-kingpin law, all but 
     four were African-American or Hispanic. And, further, out of 
     those 37, all 10 of the defendants selected by Reno 
     personally were African-American.
       Does anyone believe Janet Reno is a racist? We all know 
     she's an arch-liberal. Federal Chief Judge Sylvia Rambo was 
     asked to examine the decision-making process of the 
     department in capital prosecutions. She, in fact, found they 
     contained no evidence of racially based prosecution motives.
       The person who has stood up against the efforts--led by 
     Conyers, Edwards and Sen. Ted Kennedy--to impose the so-
     called racial-justice act on the crime-bill legislation is 
     Sen. Al D'Amato. He proposed a resolution directing the 
     Senate conferees on the crime bill to reject the racial-
     justice provision. D'Amato's resolution passed 58 to 41.
       White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta said last weekend, 
     ``If we don't get the votes to break a filibuster, then we 
     are not going to let one issue bring down the enactment of 
     the crime bill.'' You don't have to be a seer to predict that 
     both the House and Senate will vote for a conference crime 
     bill that omits the so-called racial-justice act. And so they 
     should.

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