[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 19 (Tuesday, January 31, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S1861]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                   THE DEATH PENALTY--A PIVOTAL ISSUE

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, the issue of capital punishment is 
going to rear its head again in this session of Congress, and, once 
again, we will probably do what is politically expedient but is wrong.
  I will continue to vote against capital punishment.
  Recently, William H. Rentschler of my State, a member of the 
executive committee of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 
had an op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune on the question of capital 
punishment. It contains so much common sense that I ask to insert it 
into the Record at this point.
  The article follows:

               [From the Chicago Tribune, Nov. 29, 1994]

                   The Death Penalty--A Pivotal Issue

                       (By William H. Rentschler)

       Autumn of 1994 was ``the killing season.''
       The ancient art of state-sanctioned killing clearly was a 
     dominant issue, largely ignored in most post-election 
     analyses of the Nov. 8 balloting.
       The death penalty probably was as decisive a factor in the 
     Republican sweep as the call for less government intrusion, 
     even though the two are philosophical opposites.
       Virtually every major winner, in upsetting incumbents, 
     promised, in effect, to kill more human beings for an ever 
     wider assortment of crimes, and to kill them deader and 
     quicker.
       Today, an overwhelming percentage of Americans tell 
     pollsters they favor capital punishment, which seems to have 
     become nearly as popular as tax cuts, Sunday afternoon 
     football and strawberry yogurt. Which, of course, is why 
     candidates seized on the issue with such self-righteous, 
     drum-beating fervor.
       If indeed all those elected keep their promises to enforce 
     the death penalty more vigorously and broadly, this nation, 
     in the final years of the 20th Century, will be witness to 
     the greatest killing spree on American soil since the Civil 
     War.
       Never mind that:
       There is no valid evidence capital punishment deters 
     homicides and other violent crimes. Quite the contrary, 
     homicides typically increase in the proximity of where an 
     execution is carried out.
       In our society, where the criminal justice system is 
     erratic and uncertain, we inevitably will continue to execute 
     some innocents.
       A grossly disproportionate percentage of those who die at 
     the hands of the state or wait their fate on death row are 
     poor, illiterate, African-American or Hispanic. The homicide 
     rate is highest in those states where executions are most 
     frequent. Texas is the prime example. The death penalty no 
     longer exists in any Western nation except the United States.
       The public is angry and uptight. People are terrified and 
     intolerant of escalating crime. Many want to rid society 
     permanently of the slavering brutes they perceive as 
     perpetrators of violence. A sizable majority of citizens 
     would give the state virtual carte blanche to exterminate 
     these beasts.
       But wait. The ``slavering brute'' image embraces only a 
     fraction of those who murder, maim and commit hideous, 
     heinous crimes. Chicago Police Commissioner Matt Rodriguez 
     states that homicides are committed in great numbers by 
     family members, including parents and children, friends, 
     neighbors, and business associates, than by prowling, 
     predatory strangers. And the increasing numbers of random 
     murders by violent, out-of-control youths, especially gang 
     members, occur mainly in their own urban neighborhoods,
      according to Rodriguez.
       Slight, bespectacled Susan Smith, the small-town South 
     Carolina mother who rolled her two tiny sons to a watery 
     grave in the family car, hardly fits the bestial profile 
     society embraces so readily. Yet her apparent crime was 
     monstrous and unfathomable.
       Many, I believe, wish somehow the murderer would have been 
     the black male of her fictional alibi. Then the answer would 
     have been neat and simple; it would have fed inherent 
     prejudice. That the killer, by her own confession, turned out 
     to be the pathetically confused and conscienceless young 
     (white) mother, tortured by the demons of a failed marriage, 
     mounting bills and doomed romance, is much more complicated 
     and challenging to our emotions, attitudes and pat, built-in 
     assumptions.
       The death penalty is so widely accepted largely because it 
     provides a measure of seeming certainty to a society greatly 
     frustrated by its inability to solve its most vexatious 
     problems. But it is a simplistic answer, akin to the 
     primitive law of the jungle. It is evidence of a society 
     unwilling and incapable of coming to grips rationally with 
     hard challenges.
       Capital punishment makes a mockery of such noble legal 
     canons as equal justice under law and the bedrock right of 
     all to simple fairness.
       No matter how atrocious Smith's crime, precedent tells us 
     she almost certainly will not be executed; yet the make-
     believe black man of her grotesque fairy tale surely would 
     have been found guilty and put to death if her charade had 
     been accepted.
       Los Angeles prosecutor Gil Garcetti already has announced 
     O.J. Simpson, a rich celebrity and one-time role model, will 
     not be executed if convicted of two murders by a jury. Nor 
     will any murderer of wealth, fame and community standing. 
     This confirms an old Russian proverb: ``No one is hanged who 
     has money in his pocket.''
       The death penalty is reserved exclusively for society's 
     little people, its powerless, its rabble, its dregs. This 
     alone makes capital punishment wrong in a just society.
       Since we really execute very few, since the death penalty 
     will never be a prime factor in curbing violent crime, since 
     the nation is faced with many other nagging concerns begging 
     for solutions, it is hardly unreasonable to say that those 
     candidates who collectively spent countless hours and 
     millions of TV dollars trumpeting their passionate support 
     for capital punishment were behaving irresponsibly and short-
     changing voters.
     

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