The following excerpt is from an address I made before the International Socialist Organization in April of 1995. I have not included the footnotes, but those interested can e-mail me to request my sources.

In a concurring opinion in the case of Furman v. Georgia, Justice Potter Stewart wrote:

• The penalty of death differs from all other forms of criminal punishment, not in degree
  but in kind. It is unique in its total irrevocability. It is unique in its rejection of rehabilitation
  of the convict as a basic purpose of criminal justice. And it is unique, finally, in its absolute renunciation of all that is embodied in our concept of humanity.

     Throughout all the arguments which I'll address: deterrence; the prevention of recidivism; the cost to the state of life imprisonment; and the inherent racism of capital punishment, the fact remains that it is the fundamental cruelty of capital punishment which makes it unthinkable. We believe that no society has the right to exterminate its citizens, even after lengthy appeals and procedural safeguards have been exhausted.
     The Supreme Court has been unwilling to declare that the death penalty is "cruel and unusual," and therefore in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Since the same amendment prohibits excessive fines, it seems inconsistent that death"the severest penalty possible"should be acceptable. As late as the eighteenth century, criminals were occaisionally pressed to death, drawn and quartered, or burned at the stake. These practices passed out of existence, but the technology of killing has come a long way since then. In our enlightened age, the government allows states to employ electrocution, hanging, poison gas, shooting, or lethal injection. The last of these is becoming increasingly popular. New York state senator Dale Volker, a longtime supporter of capital punishment, has been trying to figure out ways to make the death penalty appear to be more compassionate, more humane, more acceptable to the public. He has called lethal injection "killing with decency," and [Governor] Pataki himself is said to prefer this method to the electric chair out of alleged "humanitarian considerations." If there are any Young Republicans in the room, rest assured: the Governor has never been motivated by a decent, human impulse in his life, and his endorsement of lethal injection is no exception. All available evidence suggests that death by lethal injection can be every bit as painful as death by electrocution.
     Sydney Schanberg tells of an execution in Texas "where the dosage was insufficient and it took 24 minutes of choking and heaving to kill the prisoner." Raymond Landry was strapped to a gurney for 40 minutes, while executioners repeatedly probed his veins with syringes while trying to inject a lethal dose of potassium chloride. During his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton called for a "domestic Peace Corps" and renewed efforts to reclaim our devastated cities. Emphasizing the value of human life, he stated that "we donþt have a single person to lose."
     On January 24 he returned to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a death row inmate with an IQ of 65 who was clearly incapable of understanding the nature of his crimes and the punishment that awaited him. On the day his sentence was to be carried out, Rector set his dessert aside, presumably so that he could eat it after he returned from his execution. In the Pace Law Review, New York State Court of Appeals judge Joseph Bellacosa described Rector's death as follows:

• Witnesses could hear periodic slaps and groans. The medical crew was increased from two to five in an effort to find a vein that would not wilt at the needle's insertion. Rector is reported to have tried to help his executioners locate a serviceable vein. The medical crew went so far as to slash the crook of his arm with a scalpel to find a usable vein. During the hour, Rector was heard to cry out eight times. After a vein was found, the curtains were opened [so that witnesses could see into the death room]. Rector was lying on a gurney, staring dully into the middle of the room. After a few moments, he closed his eyes; then his mouth sagged as he gasped for air. Nineteen minutes after the injection, he was declared dead.     

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States claims to uphold, places limits on what a government, for any reason, may do to a human being. It proclaims each person's right to protection from deprivation of life, and it categorically states that no one shall be subjected to cruel or degrading punishment. The pre-meditated killing of prisoners in state custody violates both of these rights.
       There are generally three arguments made for capital punishment, but as we'll see, they have nomerit whatsoever.
• 
  Arguments Made to Support the Death Penalty:
  
  1. Deterrence
•      It is frequently claimed that the death penalty is an effective deterrent to violent crime. On the surface, the argument appears valid. Rational people understand the connection between cause and effect; between crime and punishment. People who commit murder, however, are rarely rational in the heat of anger, while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or in a state of panic. The mentally insane are completely unable to understand the gravity of their crime and its connection to eventual punishment.
       Thorsten Sellin's studies conducted in the United States between 1962 and 1980 found that the death penalty has no deterrent value at all. FBI statistics reveal that the murder rate in states which use the death penalty is twice that of states which do not. Almost twice as many police officers were killed in death penalty states between 1976 and 1985 than in states without these statutes. The 1988 Report to the United Nations on Crime Prevention and Control found that all of its documented research "failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment." Some researchers have found that the death penalty may actually increase the number of homicides. The Bowers-Pierce study, which analyzed executions between 1907 and 1963 concluded that an average of two additional homicides were committed in the month after an execution took place. This is consistent with the idea that executions have a "brutalizing" effect on society as a whole, and tend to devalue human life in general.
       After Ted Koppel reported the execution of Mario Marquez on January 17, he said on Nightline "Apparently, the more we as a nation support the death penalty, the less interested we are in those who are executed in our name."
  
• 2. The Death Penalty Prevents Recidivism
• It is certainly true that execution prevents a prisoner from ever committing another crime. This assumes that no other effective means of preventing crime can be found, that effective incarceration or rehabilitation are beyond the scope of modern society. Surveys conducted in New York State found that almost 80 percent of those polled would favor life imprisonment for criminals rather than execution. This raises the final argument for the death penalty—cost.
  
• 3. The Death Penalty Saves The Cost of Life Imprisonment
  
•      This repugnant argument has often been made. After all, why should taxpayers be charged for keeping murderers incarcerated? Notwithstanding the ethics of killing in order to save money, the cost of executing a person in the United States is far higher than the cost of imprisoning them for life. The full course of capital proceedings, with pre-trial motions, automatic state review, post-conviction hearings, etc., are extremely costly in terms of money and human resources. And the costs of maintaining death rows, clemency hearings, and the execution itself must be added in. A New York State study placed the cost of a single execution at $1.8 million, or three times the cost of lifetime imprisonment. Clearly, executions are a costly way to save money.
  
• The Death Penalty and Racism
       When Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court, he claimed to have only two objectives: to promote civil rights and to end capital punishment.  It was no accident that he made a connection between the two. Bob Woodward has written that Marshall was opposed to the death penalty in any form. He considered it the most conspicuous example of the unfairness of the criminal justice system. It almost seemed a penalty designed for poor minorities and the undereducated. The rich and well-educated were rarely sentenced to death. They hired fancy lawyers. With his experience in the South, and a year spent during the Korean War investigating the cases of black GIs sentenced to death, Marshall knew very well how the system worked. The death penalty was the ultimate form of racial discrimination.
       Marshall didn't have to rely on personal experience alone to reach this conclusion. While writing his opinion in Furman v. Georgia, he had access to statistics which showed that on a case-by-case basis, blacks were executed far more frequently than whites who were convicted of similar offenses. Today, this situation has actually gotten worse. A recent study conducted by Northwestern University found that blacks convicted of killing whites in Florida were five times more likely to receive death sentences than whites convicted of killing whites. In Texas, blacks were six times more likely to receive the death penalty than whites. The Stanford Law Review found similar disparities in Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Racism pervades every aspect of the legal system, and it is virtually impossible to ensure fair treatment of minorities and the poor who typically encounter a vastly different penal system than the rich who can retain better lawyers and are shown far greater leniency.
       Programs which benefit minorities and the poor are being rolled back by budget cuts on the federal and state level, but Governor Pataki has demonstrated that he is still willing to support al least one form of "Affirmative Action": capital punishment. It is far more costly than incarceration, and minorities and the poor are the overwhelming "beneficiaries."
       Everywhere we look, we are confronted with evidense that our society places little value on human life, and this goes far beyond the issue of capital punishment. The life expectancy of 20-year-old American males ranks 36th among the world's nations. The infant mortality rate in the United States is worse than twenty other western nations, and is twice as bad for black children as for white ones. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of working people who live below the poverty level has increased by 50 percent since 1980. In addition to those designated as "officially" poor, an estimated 40 million live on incomes estimated as "below standard adequacy" by the Department of Labor.
       In 1985 the Physician's Task Force on Hunger reported that at least 20 million people go hungry every month. 50 percent of the children from the poorest families grow to maturity with impaired learning ability, while 5 percent are born mentally retarded because of prenatal malnutrition. The Luxembourg Income Study produced data showing that the U.S. tolerates "a level of disadvantage unknown to any other major country on earth."
       One out of five adults is functionally illiterate, yet money for education is being cut on both the federal and state level. Resources are increasingly allocated to law enforcement, and Clinton's crime bill alone will multiply these expenditures sixfold. The United States already enjoys the world's largest per capita incarceration rate, with more than 1 million people in jail. Any nation which tolerates such wholesale misery cannot claim to respect human life, and it certainly cannot vindicate it with death. Capital punishment shocks the conscience even in a country as brutal as the United States.

     The death penalty is only one aspect of a system which engenders racism and permits poverty in the face of immense wealth. We know that crime and poverty are two sides of the same coin. Whenever efforts are made to provide opportunity for the poor, the crime rate falls. This method of crime prevention is unthinkable in a society that survives by maintaining a permanent, divided underclass. Politicians would rather spend money on a death penalty which destroys human beings than take steps to break the viscous cycle of poverty which virtually guarantees crime. They tell us that since we live in a democracy, our society reflects the will of the people. This is absolutely false for a whole range of issues, including those I've addressed today.

     New York, the most recent state to reinstitute capital punishment, did so even though almost 80 percent of the voters claim to favor life imprisonment. Social spending and education has eroded under a steady stream of budget cuts despite the fact that 80 percent of the population think "government has a responsibility to do away with poverty," this up from 70 percent when the Great Society programs were initiated 30 years ago. One last statistic: 80 percent of Americans feel that working people "have too little influence" on government. Their frustration stems from the fact that no matter what they send public officials to do, they invariably serve the rich while continuing to pay lip service to their constituents. We ask for universal health care, education, and the means to rebuild our cities; we get budget cuts to health care, tuition increases, and a bloated police force to clamp down on the resulting misery.
     We look to working people to organize a more rational society: one which places human needs and aspirations above profits. We need to recognize that we can, and do, produce enough food for everyone. Our labor creates enough wealth to house and educate everyone. In a society controlled by elites for their own benefit, we are never offered meaningful choices that underscore the value of human dignity. The death penalty: "take it or leave it."  Urban decay and state violence: "take it or leave it."  These are our current options.  I say "leave it."