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Thursday, 5/29/97 Executions gaining favor PUNISHMENT: Politician's, population's opposition to death penalty eroding

By Marianne Means New York Times It has taken decades of moralistic hand-wringing, political posturing about getting tough on crime and judicial irritation with legal delays, for the death penalty to become a quietly accepted fact of national life. We have not arrived at the state-sanctioned bloodbath opponents predicted in 1976 when the Supreme Court said it was constitutionally OK for society to kill evildoers who threaten public safety - but only if the penalty is appropriate to the crime. This means, as a practical matter, that only the most heartless murderers have been executed. The pace is slow; only 386 have been put to death since the court's ruling. Many of the condemned have been on death row for a decade or more at the taxpayers' expense. But political and legal resistance is finally conclusively collapsing. Texas leads the way with 15 executions already this year, a fact duly noted in the national news media last week. But across the country other states also seem more willing to put condemned felons to death than in the past. Last year, 45 killers were executed nationally. Several factors have brought this about. Public opinion overwhelmingly approves the death penalty and so does virtually every national politician. Michael Dukakis was the last presidential candidate to oppose it. In 1988 he was swamped by Vice President George Bush, in part because he allowed himself to be portrayed as soft on crime. During Bill Clinton's presidential campaign four years later, he flew home to Arkansas in his capacity as governor to personally oversee an execution. The last important liberal voice raised in moral outrage against the death penalty was that of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, silenced with his defeat for re-election four years ago. Afterward, New York imposed the death penalty but has yet to apply it. Not long ago Congress produced and President Clinton signed a tough crime bill that made more than 50 crimes subject to the death penalty, including some offenses in which no death has occurred, such as that of being a "drug kingpin," whatever that is. High crime rates and new laws that permit victims to speak out in court about their distress have hardened voters' attitudes toward sob stories from death row. The crusade to glamorize killers by selling sympathetic books and films has at last faded. It had become so sensationalized that a few years ago Phil Donahue petitioned for an opportunity to videotape the death throes of David Lawson, scheduled to die in North Carolina for killing a man during a burglary. Donahue argued it would be a public service, showing people what an execution is like to help them decide whether they could morally support the penalty. A court saw through this crass bid for higher TV ratings and refused to allow the modern equivalent of a hanging in the public square. Nobody, after all, filmed Lawson as he killed his victim, an informative sight that might have a contrary impact on viewer sensibilities. In addition, the array of both serious and frivolous legal appeals that postponed many executions is finally being exhausted. The courts have patiently worked their way through every excuse imaginable, including a plea by one convict to leave death row to go to his mother's funeral and kiss her body goodbye. Congress, reacting to court exasperation and overcrowded death rows, recently ordered new restrictions that have curtailed fresh appeals. The deepest moral objections to the death penalty are based on the conviction that the state has no right to take any life, even that of a social outcast who has taken the life of another. But the most compelling political argument used to be a sense of injustice; overwhelming evidence showed that black felons were more likely to be put to death than whites. There are still more blacks on death row than whites, but since the Supreme Court spoke in 1976, such convictions now stand or fall on their own legal merit and are no longer vulnerable to wholesale charges of discrimination. This does not mean that we will ever be at ease with the death penalty or stop picking at its edges. Two months ago, flames erupted from the head of condemned killer Pedro Medina as he was put to death in a malfunctioning Florida electric chair. Nobody argued that Medina didn't deserve to die, but his end did seem barbaric and led to appeals to use some other method of capital punishment. The use of genetic tests, new evidence not available when many death row inmates were convicted, is becoming popular as a last-ditch effort to prove innocence. This only casts reasonable doubt, however, if the inmate is really not guilty. In Peoria, the Illinois Supreme Court stayed an execution date earlier this month pending the outcome of DNA tests from semen, sweat and blood samples taken from a murdered woman's body. The tests were authorized by the man, Willie Enoch, convicted of killing her. Oops, the tests confirmed his guilt. Another new legal frontier is the question of how to treat juveniles who act like adults in committing brutal murders. In California, Gov. Pete Wilson is considering a law to allow the execution of young teens who randomly and wantonly kill other people, a crime problem that is especially alarming.