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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 13, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Lawyers call for halt to executions

By John Catalinotto

On Feb. 3, the American Bar Association, at a mid-year conference in San Antonio, Texas, defied the Clinton administration and the ABA's own president to urge an immediate halt to all executions in the United States.

The ABA's House of Delegates passed a 19-page resolution calling for a moratorium on capital punishment.

The ABA is a conservative organization of lawyers. Yet the 280-to-119 vote called the death penalty "a haphazard maze of unfair practices."

The fact that the ABA would take such a strong position reflects both its recognition of the growing movement against the racist death penalty, and the legal establishment's own unease with the flagrant injustice that is rampant in this country's criminal-justice system.

The ABA delegates flouted the wishes of ABA President N. Lee Cooper, who said he supports the death penalty. They also defied the Clinton administration. Justice Department officials had been dispatched to San Antonio to let the lawyers know the government didn't want this vote.

One New York lawyer, Ron Tabak, went so far as to say the death-penalty system "is in shambles." He called it "significant that lawyers, those closest to the system," called for a halt in carrying out the executions of the over 3,000 inmates on death row.

In June 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is "cruel and unusual punishment." In June 1976 the court overruled this decision. At the time no one had been executed since 1967. But the killing began again when Gary Gilmore was executed in January 1977.

Since that time the rate of executions has grown almost yearly. Texas-where the ABA vote came-leads the states in number of prisoners on death row and number actually executed.

President Clinton has taken a very public stand in favor of the death penalty. During his 1992 presidential campaign he went back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally retarded inmate.

Clinton also pushed the so-called anti-terrorism law that was passed last fall. It includes the death penalty. So does the anti-crime bill that expanded federal application of capital punishment.

Many of the lawyers who voted for the anti-death-penalty resolution pointed out the racist character of sentencing in the U.S. courts. The number of Black, Latino and Native inmates on death row is far disproportionate to the population. The ABA resolution also took note of how impoverished defendants who can't buy the best legal representation end up in prison and on death row.

Anti-death-penalty activists said the ABA vote would boost their struggle to stop legal lynching.

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