Convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh demanded this week in a published letter that the United States "hold a true public execution -- allow a public broadcast" on May 16, when he is scheduled to be put to death.
McVeigh is set to be executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana for his role in the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The bombing killed 168 people and injured 500.
If all goes as scheduled, McVeigh will be the first federal inmate executed since 1963. He dropped all appeals in February and has until Friday to seek clemency from President Bush.
McVeigh's appeal for a national broadcast of his execution has promoted fierce debate over the past week, especially since his appeal came at a point in time when capital punishment has been consistently in the national spotlight.
In a reminder of our national responsibility, McVeigh declared, "If it is our collective judgment that capital punishment is a reasonable response to crime, we need to come to grips with what it actually is."
While Dan Dunne, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons said that a national broadcast is not an option, McVeigh has raised interesting questions about the future of the death penalty. He is in favor of public scrutiny of government action, including his own execution.
In another recent case of death penalty controversy, Earl Washington Jr. walked out of prison after spending nine and a half years on Virginia's death row for a murder he did not commit early Monday morning. Largely illiterate and with an IQ of 69, Washington was cleared by multiple DNA tests which showed that he was wrongly convicted.
The DNA test results have prompted Virginia legislators to rethink the death penalty and its function in the judicial process. Virginia, however, is not the only state rethinking its capital punishment policy. Currently six states -- Illinois, Nebraska, Arizona, North Carolina, Maryland and Indiana -- have launched capital punishment studies looking at issues ranging from the quality of defense lawyers to the overall functioning of the death penalty.
Illinois has been especially quick to act in response to the results of the studies. Gov. George Ryan, a first-term Republican, halted executions indefinitely a year ago after a string of men were released from death row either because they had been wrongly convicted or had not received fair trials.
Columbia University Professor James Leibman said that a percentage "of all the error that is being found in this system is because of lawyers that are so bad that you can actually prove that the outcome probably would have been different if you had had a better lawyer."
Last month, prompted by the release of 13 inmates from Illinois' death row, the state's Supreme Court has set some of the nation's most rigorous standards of training and experience for defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges who handle capital cases.
Under rules issued in Jan. 2001, the lead lawyer on each side must have at least five years of criminal litigation experience. None was required previously. In addition, the lead lawyer must have worked on at least two murder trials.
Judges who preside over capital cases must attend training seminars every two years. And prosecutors must let defense attorneys know quickly if they intend to seek the death penalty.
Dudley Sharp, director of death penalty resources for the Houston-based victims advocacy group Justice For All, said that the new rules were fair because they apply to both prosecutors and defense lawyers.
The actions implemented by Illinois answer many questions put forth by the American Medical Association over the course of the past year. The AMA released a study, conducted by the Columbia University Law School, which concluded that serious errors occur in nearly 70 percent of all death penalty cases. The AMA has demanded a national moratorium on all executions until further studies occur.
In a similar investigation, the Chicago Tribune reported last year that "dozens" of inmates have been put to death in Texas despite unreliable evidence, representation by disbarred or suspended attorneys, and questionable psychiatrists' testimonies.
Then-Governor George W. Bush stated that he "strongly disagrees" with the findings of the study. He said that "we've adequately answered innocence and guilt and everybody's had full access to the courts."
The Tribune's investigation of the 131 executions in Texas during Bush's tenure found that defense attorneys for 40 of the inmates presented just one witness or no evidence at all during the trials' sentencing phase.
Defendants in about one-third of the Texas cases were represented at trial or initial appeal by an attorney who had been or later was disbarred, suspended or otherwise sanctioned, the report said.
University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell was quick to point to a different interpretation of the Tribune's study. He noted that the state with the lowest error rate was Virginia, also the state with the second highest number of executions.
The highest error percentage, with 87 percent, belonged to California, a state with a very low number of executions. Cassell stated that "there can be no claim that anyone has been wrongfully executed."
However, one can question whether or not there are criminals who are instead evading the death penalty because of the chance of error. Cassell argued that "the judges [in Virginia] are doing their job and maybe we should move them to California where liberal judges are going on their personal views."
Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 701 inmates have been put to death. A Gallup Poll conducted in the latter part of last year found that 66 percent of Americans support the death penalty, but the number of supporters is falling. That rate is down from the 80 percent support rate just six years ago.
However, the lack of support for the death penalty does not necessarily mean that the American public does not agree with the policy in general, but rather that they are displeased with the way it is being implemented in the United States.
In another case this week, Wanda Jean Allen received a lethal dose of drugs at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Allen was sentenced for killing her lover Gloria Leathers outside a police station in 1988.
A federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court denied last-minute appeals even though claims were made that, with an IQ of 69, Allen was mentally challenged and that she did not have adequate representation. Allen was the first black woman to be put to death in the United States since 1954.
Allen is also only the third woman to be put to death in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated. Her execution ignited claims by many groups that sentencing in capital cases is largely biased on the matter of gender.
Victor Streib, a leading expert in the field of gender bias and a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, has shown that while women comprise 13 percent of murder arrests in the U.S., they account for only 2 percent of the death sentences. And of those two percent, few are ever set for execution.
Gender bias challenges run into the same obstacles as racial challenges, says Streib. As of the publication of this article, 1,948 of death row inmates were white, while 1,514 were black. Since the resumption of executions in the early 1980's, 40 percent of those executed have been black.
Some death-penalty advocates argue, however, that the problem is that there are too few executions, not too many. They also claim that if the statistical sample were bigger, there would be more valid analyses of the impact of race.
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