In January 1985 a sign with flashing lights outside a bar in Macon, Georgia, advertised a "Roosevelt Green Party." Roosevelt Green, a destitute black man, had been sentenced to die in Georgia's electric chair on January 9. The party consisted of a "happy hour" beginning at the time of Green's execution, with free drinks for everyone in the bar when the official announcement of his death came.
In Atlanta, friends of Roosevelt Green gathered for a worship service and prayer vigil 50 miles from the prison where he died. At previous executions, they had held candles and offered prayers just outside the prison walls. But the changing atmosphere outside the prison on execution days began to make honoring men like Roosevelt Green there more and more difficult.
Ku Klux Klan members were beginning to turn out in large numbers, "looking for sport," as one death penalty opponent put it. Soldiers were stationed around the prison and helicopters circled overhead, while the press roamed the prison grounds in packs, hoping to record every grisly detail. An infectious spirit of vengeance seems to be spreading.
A nationwide rise in vindictive activity toward death row prisoners and their advocates seems to confirm a trend of opinion about the death penalty in the last two decades. A series of Gallup surveys found that in 1966, 42 percent of U.S. citizens favored the execution of convicted murderers. That number climbed to 66 percent in 1981 and 72 percent in 1985. The Pacific News Service reported in March of this year that worldwide support for the death penalty is at an all-time high.
A similar trend can be observed in the U.S. judicial system. Five years ago Justice William H. Rehnquist accused his Supreme Court colleagues of allowing the death penalty to become "virtually an illusion" surrounded by "arcane niceties" that made the possibility of execution for death row prisoners extremely low. In the years since, the view of Rehnquist, recently named chief justice, has shifted from the dissenting opinion to the majority position of the court.
ON MAY 5,1986, the Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to death row prisoners and those who work on their behalf. In a 6-to-3 decision (Lockhart v. McCree), the court ruled that committed opponents of the death penalty maybe barred from juries in capital cases, regardless of whether such action increases the likelihood of a defendant's conviction. The decision moved hundreds of death row prisoners closer to the execution chamber and rejected one of the last systemic challenges to the judicial system's procedures for imposition of the death penalty.
Following the decision Justice Rehnquist stated that there were "serious flaws" in the 15 studies that had been cited by lower courts and the defendant in the case as proof that "death qualification"--excluding death penalty opponents from juries--would make conviction more likely. But he added that, even if the studies' conclusions had been accepted, the decision would have been the same.
Rehnquist held that placing a defendant before a "conviction-prone" jury did not violate the defendant's constitutional right to a fair trial. Trivializing his opponents' concerns, he stated that it would be "hopelessly impractical" to require trial judges to undertake the task of "'balancing' juries, making sure that each contains the proper number of Democrats and Republicans, young persons and old persons, white-collar executives and blue-collar laborers, and so on."
In a strong dissenting opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall assailed the court's endorsement of a practice that "systematically operates to render juries more likely to convict." He added that "death qualification" would exclude at least 11 to 17 percent of potential jurors, including a disproportionate number of blacks and women.
In light of the May 5 ruling, the only remaining major challenge to the procedural administration of the death penalty is one based on statistical studies showing racial disparities in the imposition of the death sentence. A case filed with the Supreme Court includes evidence that persons who killed whites in Georgia were 11 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks. The case is still under consideration for review. On June 9 the court decided to review a similar case filed by a Florida death row prisoner.
THE IMPACT OF the May 5 decision was immediate. Prior to the ruling, executions in Georgia and elsewhere had been temporarily stopped pending outcome of Lockhart v. McCree. A month after the , decision, I spoke with Rev. Murphy Davis, Georgia director of the Southern Prison : Ministry. Following a 15-month moratorium on executions, she and other advocates for i death row prisoners in Georgia were facing execution dates for two friends the following week.
"Next week we will kill our seventh and eighth death row prisoners in Georgia," said Davis. "They are the sixth and seventh who are black and utterly destitute. One, like a man before him, is clinically retarded. All of the people we kill are people who never could have afforded their own legal defense.
"The studies presented to the court were matters of common sense. But the truth simply doesn't matter. Rehnquist and his type can say, 'Doesn't the emperor have a beautiful suit?' But the emperor is naked. There is a sense of helplessness and overwhelming frustration when you have to watch people die on the basis of lies."
Davis has been the target of harassment for her work with death row prisoners and has had the lives of close friends on death row claimed by the spirit of vengeance. "What we have is an overwhelming public need for the expression of outrage," she says, "and we have no creative leadership showing us how to heal ourselves and make our society work. We are getting leadership that whips up the need for scapegoats, at home and around the globe. There is a human toll not only because we are creating new victims, but also because of what we are doing to ourselves. Putting our hope in methods of violence and destruction is only sinking us more deeply into hopelessness."
In the face of the most recent judicial blow, death penalty opponents are sobered but committed to continuing the struggle to uphold the sacredness of life. It is a struggle that often feels lonely, as Davis reflected: "We are talking here about guilty people. That's where mainline theology often breaks down; it's easier to get support for causes involving the potential deaths of thousands of innocent children. But when we talk about guilty people, we're talking about us. If we didn't have God come to stand with us, we wouldn't have the Christian church."
For the long struggle ahead, we at Sojourners extend our grateful support to those who so tirelessly work to keep hope alive. We pray for our nation's 1,714 death row prisoners, their families and friends. And we plead that hardened hearts might be turned to hearts of compassion.
Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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