Death penalty: Is support really waning?

Despite growing signs of public worry that some innocents may be mistakenly sentenced to death, the failure of a celebrity-laden campaign to block California's execution Tuesday morning of Crips founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams reflected a national political landscape in which the public has yet to turn against capital punishment on moral grounds.

The execution of Williams, who supporters said found redemption and turned into an anti-gang proselytizer in the 20-plus years since his conviction for four murders, came less than two weeks after North Carolina executed double-murderer Kenneth Boyd, marking the nation's 1,000th execution since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

And it occurred against a backdrop of indications that the national appetite for executions is on the wane. Williams was the 59th prisoner put to death this year, down from a high of 98 in 1999. Juries last year sentenced only 125 defendants to death, compared with more than 300 per year during the mid-1990s.

Gallup polls this year show public support for the death penalty at 64 percent, down from 80 percent in a 1994 poll.

But even death penalty opponents concede that those numbers indicate primarily practical concerns — public reaction to dozens of cases in which DNA has provided indisputable proof that individuals were wrongly convicted, questions about the competency of defense lawyers appointed to represent death-eligible defendants, and strong indications that capital sentences disproportionately are imposed on minorities.

Williams, who centered his effort to get clemency from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his public appeal on redemption in prison rather than innocence, and on support from a celebrity crowd that included actors such as Mike Farrell and Jamie Foxx and rapper Snoop Dogg, was not well-positioned to benefit from those concerns.

"There were complex and complicating factors," said David Elliot, communications director for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. ". . . It was a difficult case. But any time we get to have a conversation with the American public about the fairness of the death penalty, it helps us."

"This was a very bad person for them to choose for their stand," said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death-penalty California group. "They had all the ingredients except the central part of it. Tookie was a terrible, remorseless murderer. I think they lost some traction. I don't think anyone's mind was changed on the death penalty, and some people in the middle may have said, 'This is really ridiculous.' "