Ultimate punishment
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
A Miami-based exile organization is launching a campaign to abolish the death penalty in Cuba according to a story in El Nuevo Herald (“Lanzan campaña a favor de abolir la pena de muerte;” December 11, 2010). The effort is being spearheaded by the Christian Democratic Party of Cuba (Partido Demócrata Cristiano de Cuba-PDC-Cuba), led by Marcelino Miyares. It has the support of some former political prisoners, a few exile organizations based in Madrid, and a smattering of dissident groups on the island.
The goal of the PDC-Cuba campaign is unobjectionable. The abolition of the death penalty has been a key item on the agenda of advocates of human rights for decades. As far back as the mid-nineteen-fifties, intellectuals like Arthur Koestler (Great Britain;”Reflections on Hanging”) and Albert Camus (France; “Reflections on the Guillotine”) were writing impassioned essays as part of a campaign for the abolition of capital punishment in Europe.
In the ensuing decades all of the nations of the European Union have outlawed the death penalty. Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have been calling for all countries to end capital punishment. And, on December 18, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly, by a decisive vote of 104 to 54 with 29 abstentions, approved a resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment.
Yes, the death penalty should be abolished in Cuba, as in every other country in the world. Yet it is curious that an organization based in the United States would be calling for the abolition of the death penalty in Cuba—where the maximum penalty (which was used liberally in the 1960s in the context of a virtual civil war in which the anti-government forces were backed by the CIA) has rarely been applied in recent years—and not in the United States, where our taxes are being lavishly spent to execute mainly those too poor to afford a good defense.
The most recent news about the death penalty in Cuba is that two Salvadorans, convicted and sentenced to death in connection with acts of terror perpetrated against Cuban tourist installations in the 1990s at the direction of the notorious exile terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and with funding from members of the Cuban American National Foundation, have had their sentences commuted to 30 years in prison. In one of those cases, a young Italian tourist, Fabio Di Celmo, was killed by a bomb placed in a hotel. While the Cuban government has refused to abolish the death penalty citing reasons of national security, the reality is that an undeclared virtual moratorium on capital punishment appears to be in place in Cuba today.
The situation is quite different in the United States. Since the 1976 execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah by firing squad ended a moratorium imposed by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1,233 people have been put to death in the United States. In all, thirty-five states have the death penalty on the books, while fifteen states plus the District of Columbia refrain from practicing capital punishment. In the Southern states of the old slave-owning Confederacy, including Texas and Florida, the death penalty is applied with particular gusto, and commutations are extremely rare. When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he set a record for executions while clemency petitions were routinely denied with little consideration of the factual or legal aspects of the individual case.
Not only is the fate of defendants dependent on the jurisdiction in which they committed their crimes, whether it is a state with a racist legacy and a conservative population or a liberal jurisdiction like Washington DC. Research also has shown that many other biases enter into the fateful decision of who lives and who dies.
For instance, the race of the victim is correlated with the seriousness of the penalty. Capital punishment is more likely to be applied where the victim is white, especially if the perpetrator is black. In some cases, convicts whose public defenders have slept through part of the proceedings or showed up in court drunk have nevertheless been put to death. So have defendants who committed their crimes when they were minors and persons with IQs low enough to be classified as mentally handicapped. In addition, in recent years many convicts sitting on death row for years have been exonerated through the use of DNA tests. This technology has only been widely used for a little over a decade, raising the question of how many innocent men and women might have been executed before the advent of forensic DNA technology. As recently as last week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about a man in California who is set to die next year by lethal injection despite sufficient evidence of innocence to convince five federal judges.
The worst news about capital punishment in the United States today is that, unlike the case of Cuba, where the practice seems to be falling de facto into disuse, the machinery of state sponsored homicide is likely to continue to churn for decades to come. The combination of conservative state legislatures and a right-wing Supreme Court means that abolition will not happen in the foreseeable future.
