Death Penalty Reminder: 160 people sentenced to death were later found to be not guilty

BALTIMORE – As far as I know, the last person to be strapped into the gas chamber at the Maryland Penitentiary was me. Years ago, I spent a week on Death Row, interviewing inmates assigned to die, and figured I’d top it off by getting a more intimate feel for their final moments.

Two things have stayed with me in the near-half century since: that final slamming of the gas chamber door, which seemed like the closing of a coffin. And the unanimous belief among the dozen Death Row inmates, in one claustrophobic cell after another, that each man would rather be executed at that very moment than live out his life endlessly waiting for an official death date.

They talked about days and nights all alone in their cells, about the sheer loneliness, about never knowing the embrace of another human being. From a couple of cells, they had a pretty good angle onto a busy street outside, where folks went about their lives. It added to their sense of isolation and torment and sheer rejection by the rest of the human race.

And yet, we think we’re punishing them best by merely killing them.

All of this came back to me the other day, when William Barr, the U.S. attorney general, announced that the federal government is bringing back the death penalty.

Critics have cited Barr’s immaculate sense of timing. Thirty states still put people to death, but there’s been an unofficial federal moratorium on it since 2003. But we’re heading into an election season, and President Donald Trump famously champions capital punishment.

Mainly, he’s famous for championing it for the wrong people.

Well, what the hell, mistakes happen, don’t they?

Among opponents of the death penalty are those who point out that 160 people sentenced to death since 1973 were later exonerated. Among them are the so-called Central Park 5, the five black and Latino men wrongly convicted, as teenagers, in the brutal rape of a jogger in New York.

Trump was a long way from his presidency back then, but he already had his big mouth. At the height of 1989’s hysteria over the five youngsters, he bought full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty.

Deploring “the dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman,” Trump attacked then-Mayor Edward Koch for saying “that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murders.”

So do many of us. Except that Trump had the wrong muggers and murderers.

The five teenagers said police coerced them into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. They were wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for gang-raping and nearly killing their victim.

But their convictions were vacated in 2002, and the city of New York paid $41 million in 2014 to settle their civil rights lawsuit.

Last month, Trump was asked about those old newspapers ads. He’d never issued an apology to the five youngsters. Would he do it now?

His short answer was no. His longer answer echoed Charlottesville when the president somehow saw “good people” on both sides of the racist, anti-Semitic rally there.

Of the Central Park 5, Trump stood on the White House lawn June 18, and said, “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.” Thus, the president willfully chose to cut history short of its actual conclusion.

So now he’s got his Justice Department gearing up to put criminals – at least we hope they’re criminals – to death. The country has mixed feelings about this, according to polling. A 1996 poll said 80 percent of us favored it. Now it’s reportedly about 50-50.

We can argue about it forever – and we already have. If someone I know was viciously attacked, my heart would want the assailant cremated on the spot on Good Morning America, for the whole country to see.

On the other hand, I remember those Death Row inmates years ago at the Maryland Penitentiary, each one saying execution would be better than the torture of endless years in their cells while the courts and the politicians figured things out.

Why give them what they’d prefer?

What’s questioned right now, though, is the timing of the latest announcement. It’s one more way to divide the country over an issue with long-established racial overtones, such as the black-white disparity in sentencing.

But there’s also the irony of Trump ready to revive an issue on which he looks like such a fool, calling for punishment of five innocent young men and now refusing, so many years later, to apologize for his callous blunder.

 

Feature photo: The Gas Chamber at New Mexico in 2008. Photo by Shelka04 at en.wikipedia