OCT-NOV 97 - HOME

JERRY BROWN AND MIKE FARRELL ON THE DEATH PENALTY

Jerry Brown: In a strange way, the more violent our society becomes, the more popular the death penalty gets. It feeds on itself. Some people think medicalizing death makes it more sanitary, more scientific, more technological, therefore more acceptable. But this type of reform is more probably a way to keep the abuse stronger than ever, modifying around the edges, but leaving the essence untouched.

Mike Farrell: One of the slogans of the pro-death forces is finality, that we've got to have an end to the legal process. But they don't tell you that the reason capital punishment cases take so long is because of court-mandated appeals that were required by the Supreme Court in order to make the death penalty constitutional. They don't tell you that the courts are backlogged with extraordinarily high levels of issues all across the board. Attorneys file papers and the court doesn't respond to them. The idea that these cases are being dragged out by tricksters and death penalty attorneys who use technicalities against the system is not true. Very difficult cases take a long period of time to resolve.

Certain groups in this country say that "liberals" are causing us problems, but the death penalty isn't an issue of right or left, liberal or conservative. It's a matter of which people are concerned about the rights of individuals and which people believe that the system, as it is now practiced-the corporate system and the judicial system and the political system-must be allowed to move forward even as it tramples, unhampered and unimpeded, the rights of individuals. We mustn't be stampeded into blame-saying and name-calling about "liberals" and "those folks." It's really about whether or not you believe in the premises upon which this country was based, the dignity and value and rights of each individual, and whether or not those ought to be protected under law.

JB. In the "adversarial system," which the American criminal justice system is called, the prosecutor is pushing as hard as possible to get a conviction. The system assumes there will be an equal advocacy on the part of the defendant by the defense lawyer and that there is a neutral judge. But in fact, most judges are former prosecutors. At the federal level, even Clinton can hardly appoint anyone who isn't very biased towards the prosecution. If there's a whiff of defense experience or sentiment, a candidate will not even be considered by the judiciary committee. So you have already a judiciary tilted toward the prosecution and very weak defense representation, except for a few celebrated cases and the few times when the public defenders have the resources to do what they need to do. And you have a media pushing the crime wave. It has been shown that the media crime wave has no relationship to the real incidence of crime. In the early '90s the incidence of crime reported in the media was way up, even though crime had actually gone down. So it is very hard to get a level playing field.

MF. The International Commission of Jurists-an international body of judges and lawyers-examined the U.S. death penalty system and issued a very condemning report last June. One aspect was the politici­p;zation of the system so that justices, judges, prosecutors who want to continue in office have to continue to service this pro-death mania. People who stand up and say this isn't right are voted out or chased out of office.

JB. There's so much anti-government rhetoric against state power. Yet they are building up tremendous, childlike confidence in the state power to kill, to surveille, to incarcerate, to spy. The power of the state is getting stronger, more pervasive, more unchecked, therefore more dangerous-way out of proportion to the original founding spirit, which was quite hostile to a very strong central power.

MF. Human Rights Watch has condemned the death penalty system in the United States as fundamentally in violation of human rights. Amnesty International has done the same thing. We are the only so-called developed Western nation that continues to use the death penalty.

JB. You can certainly look at murders as a reflection of individual moral culpability, but when you look at 25,000 homicides a year, you have to say the system is not working very well, so who's guilty there? The people who have the public power, academic power, media power are part of a system that is generating gross evidence of dysfunctionality. It's true when someone pulls a trigger or wields a knife, that person has done wrong, but when a system, a culture, breeds that many killers, there's something really sick there. For example, 40% of the kids in foster homes end up in the criminal justice system. The number of foster children in this country has doubled to almost half a million very young people, and this relates to the poverty, the drugs, the racial isolation, the dysfunctionality.

Many kids are growing up deprived of human rights, maybe because their parents are losers, criminals, dope addicts, or maybe just came upon hard times or are psychologically impaired. But one thing we know- kids aren't responsible for that experience. Yet they are bearing the burden of a situation that the state or communities could alleviate much more than they are. It could be alleviated by steps we started to take in the Great Society efforts, the War on Poverty, but those efforts have been interrupted, first by the Vietnam war, and we never went back to it. I'm thinking about child care, about a better foster care system, about a better rehab system for juvenile delinquency, and all the rest. That's not being done. There's something out of whack here in the apportionment of effort. At the very moment when taxes are being reduced, there is no alleviating the heavy burden on so many kids.

MF. Nine out of ten people on death row in the United States have been physically or sexually abused, and studies have shown that here in California alone we would save $90 million a year simply by eliminating the death system. That money could go to programs that would solve some of our social problems and ease our violence problem at the same time.

JB. Back in Washington they're congratulating themselves on a balanced budget and capital gains reduction; the President just okayed more arms sales to Chile and countries in South America; and there's expansion of NATO and all the arms production. There's a focus everywhere else except right here, where we're generating a violence that we are most responsible for.

MF. James Gilligan, a doctor who was a medical officer in charge of the Massachusetts prison system, wrote a book on the epidemic of violence in America. He says that violence in his experience is somebody acting out a need to right a wrong. He says that's true if you are the state, and that's true if you are the individual. There is no difference-the dynamics of violence are identical in all circumstances. So what we have to do is find a way to stop it, not continue it as we do by killing people.

JB. People don't like to take responsibility for certain consequences coming out of the culture. For instance, the way this highly competitive, highly anonymous, highly mobile, highly stimulating society is organized has to be connected to the incredible number of murders. Otherwise, why aren't there more murders in France and other places? There are a lot of arrests in this country, and there are a lot of executions, yet one third of the homicides are not solved. So if the goal is protection of the public, the death penalty is not going to do it. Killing 80 people a year or killing 800 a year is not going to do it. The people who are potential victims would be better protected if we were dealing with the larger social issues and creating a more humane, high, human consciousness.

MF. America is certainly a violent society by anybody's standard. There are twelve states that don't have the death penalty, and in those states the murder rate is lower than in the states that do have the death penalty. Michigan is a state without a death penalty system as are Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa. A number of states don't have the same kind of problems that we do, and it's not because they don't have major cities. It's because they don't have a system that deals with people as chattel that can be ground up. Inserting violence into the system is not an appropriate solution to problems of violence.

JB. It's a whole pattern, and it's a very violent pattern in terms of crime. It's not like there aren't arrests. There are about 14 million arrests a year in this country. There are something like 50 million criminal records out there with a tremendous police operation. And there are private-sponsored police-guards that people have for one reason or another-bigger than the public police operation. Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system. Pelican Bay, Marion, have sensory deprivation cells where people just sit and rot. Prisoners vary from the murderer to the dope peddler to the fellow that got arrested for the first time, and they are treated in many ways as subhuman. Then they become the "other" that is not a human being, that shouldn't get education, that shouldn't get rehabilitation. There's no redemption. At the same time you have people like Jesse Helms who run around talking about Christianity, when right there in the Sermon on the Mount there's the injunction to visit those in prison. It's right there-feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit people in prison. They're preaching a doctrine and not even including a full measure of it. The inhumanity, the stigmatization, the dehumanization is very dangerous as you build up the central power of the state to surveille, to incarcerate, with tremendous bias to the prosecution, and an appetite for more and more state murders, state executions. It is pushing in a very dangerous direction. In fact, some of the same rhetoric used by the law-and-order crowd has been used by authoritarian states over and over again. "Speed it up, the streets are in chaos, we've got to have law and order, we've got to show the state is powerful." These are very dangerous trends. As long as people are afraid of crime, it will be very popular. Therefore, you have to get at the problem of fear, and that means getting at the problem of the whole social structure.

MF. One complaint we hear a lot is that prisons are nothing but country clubs where people can watch color television and press weights, do bar bell exercises. But in USA Today, we learn that they're talking about building a supermax system much like Pelican Bay and Marion and others where people will be incarcerated in a cement box, 6 feet by 8 feet, for 23 hours and 20 minutes every day, where they will get one visit and one phone call a month, where they will not see another human being, where their meals will be slid in to them through a hole in the door. We're talking about dehumanizing people to the point of creating the very thing we fear.

George Gerbner from the Annenberg School talks about the effect of the news media. He refers to the "dangerous world syndrome," where all that people see and hear in the news is about crime and rape and street gangs and murders. People begin to imagine a world that's far worse and more violent than it is. As a result, they behave in a manner that is consistent with that world, thus creating the world they fear.

JB. When we're racially divided, and when the division is disproportionate in terms of who has the money and who doesn't, and when there is racial disproportionality in the prisons, so that half the people there are African American and another significant percentage is composed of other minorities, particularly Latinos, you have a very combustible situation. By the time an African American man is thirty, he has about an 80% chance of having been arrested once. That's an incredible stigma that is being worked out through the system. It's part of a culture-anthropologists call it "carceral," a fancy word for imprisonment-a very ominous carceral culture. A lot of conservatives may not realize that they're laying the foundation for a very authoritarian state. When you don't have an independent judiciary and when you can kill people, then theoretically if death penalty advocates had their way, there would be thousands and thousands of state executions, dozens of them every day. People shrink back from that, so what we get is a lottery of maybe a hundred cases. If things really get bad, maybe it'll be two or three hundred cases, so the death penalty is a dark metaphor for execution of the murderer when in fact there are 25,000 murderers and 24,900 are not executed.

MF. We have tremendous social problems that need to be dealt with but we are being given a bill of goods that says, "Here's the way to deal with it- build more prisons, throw more people away." If they're young and never had a chance, if they're black and never had a chance, it doesn't matter. "Kill more of them and that will solve our problems."

It will not solve our problems. It will create more problems.

JB. It is creating more problems! The war going on in the streets is in many ways the war for the minds and hearts of America, which we talked about during the Vietnam war. There's a war going on in the universities about whose America it is, and which way to go. A very powerful side of that war, the predominant side, is the death penalty/authoritarian/surveillance operation. It is ominous, and it is dangerous. That's why we have to look at the death penalty as part of a larger pattern that is inhuman.

The general notion that human beings are special and are entitled to respect even when they do bad things-a notion that distinguishes the bad act from the essential human being in front of you-that's a basic idea sometimes associated with civilization. In contemporary society, human beings are not respected under many conditions, particularly when the state snuffs out a life that it did not create. Once a person is convicted, that person is in the category of the damned, literally the condemned, which reflects a much deeper problem-the stigmatization, the separation, the desired annihilation of a whole class of people. It cheapens the sensibility.

For example, the President recently authorized the sale of jet fighters-whose job is warfare, killing people-to Latin America where there is no evident enemy right now. What's this all about? Whether it's Reagan bombing Khadaffi's household when we're not in a state of war or Bush bombing people in Panama, it's okay to kill human beings. It's okay for Clinton to kill eight people in June of 1993 because he wanted to send a "message" to Hussein about a plot on George Bush's life. There's a general sense that killing people under certain circumstances is not only okay-it's a good.

We've got to back up here and say it's not okay. It's not okay even to kill guilty people. It's good to lock them up, and it's good to protect people, but if you want to take us to the highest level of enlightenment, you don't inject people with lethal chemicals or hang them or gas them or shoot them in a firing squad. In San Francisco they had the vigilantes and it was a big, big picnic. It was a picnic in London. That was the state of mind, and we can revert to it if we want, or we can try to transcend it. Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness.

MF. When we are concerned about public safety, we propound social policies that deal with those issues. We have remedies under law that are effective and appropriate and less expensive than the death penalty. And they are humane. They don't make us stoop to the level of a killer. What we have available to us in California and many states around the country is life in prison without possibility of parole. That means exactly what it says. Seventeen hundred people have been judged guilty of capital crimes and been sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole in this state alone. Not one of them has ever seen the light of day again. Nor will they.

JB. The great Norwegian criminologist, Nils Christie, has written a book called The Industrialization of Crime: the Gulag Western Style. He calls American prisons "gulags." The way people are treated in them is very similar to gulags, and there are more and more prisons like that now because prisoners are working, earning money for private entities, and this is true in the Soviet bloc where a lot of the prisons were the most efficient production systems they had. That's now being emulated in the United States. It's highly dangerous. What we have here is a whole continuum, how you treat the person arrested for a couple of milligrams of cocaine or crack, how you treat the person who kills-all that is a test of what kind of people we are. It takes a conversion in consciousness to get at it. We don't get rid of the death penalty unless we have a different approach to how we see other human beings.

First of all, we need to get honest history books and start acknowledging that even after Columbus' second visit, there were 30,000 dead human beings as a result. Jefferson had slaves, and Jackson wiped out the Seminole Indians on his way through Florida. A tremendous amount of violence has existed along with very positive accomplishments. That's the dilemma here. How do we assess the American experiment? How do we assess a human being? America is a lot better than many places in the world but we've got a lot of blood here, a lot of blood. Even now we have a president who will not reveal to the Honduran government what the CIA knows about atrocities by the government generals who were on the payroll of the CIA or at least known to CIA agents in Honduras. That information is being covered up by President Bill Clinton. There is not a deep, pervasive appetite to get at the truth when the truth is ugly. You have to read someone like Noam Chomsky to get the dark view. With the dark view, you also get a lot of positive. Can a sophisticated mind hold both these concepts? If we can develop that habit, then we can deal with the horrors of murder without creating the horrors of state killing. I don't think we're there yet.

MF. I think we can be. We are not captives of our history. We can use all the extraordinary advances that have come to us through the years as a springboard leading to the society that we want to see exist and not give in to the forces that say, "Put them away, kill them, they are the enemy, they don't possess any value."

It's "us"- it's not "them" and "us." We can bring executions to an end and begin to find an alternative that is humane and appropriate and consistent with our stated values. We're not trapped by history. We can be guided by it and hopefully can learn from it. The organizing principle of the early United States was the concept of Manifest Destiny and for the last seventy-five years, the organizing principle of the United States was anti-communism. Both of them have a negative essence. What I would like to see happen now at the end of the Cold War is that we consider the fundamental concept of human rights and human dignity of all people as an organizing principle. That is something we can move forward with, toward the realization of the greatness that is within us.

Mike Farrell, famous from M*A*S*H days, is a screen actor and a film producer, who has also been spearheading opposition to the death penalty in California as well as around the country. He is the President of the Board of Directors of Death Penalty Focus of California, a statewide abolition organization.

-Material for this article was excerpted and edited, with permission, from Jerry Brown's "We The People" radio program. Contact We The People in Oakland, 1-800-426-1112, or at 200 Harrison St., Oakland, CA 94607 for more information or to join We the People. The web site for We the People is http://www.wtp.org

OCT-NOV 97 -- N.C.Xpress -- Archives -- Electrons to the Editor