Executions aren't news - why they should be.

• Author: DeParle, Jason

EXECUTIONS AREN'T NEWS

Why They Should Be

When Louisiana held its first execution in 22 years, there was a line to get in. More than a hundred reporters from across the country trekked to the remote state penitentiary on December 14, 1983, the night Robert Wayne Williams died in the electric chair. The national television networks were there. The New York Times was there. Photographers competed for portraits of grief as the condemned man's mother prayed outside the prison gates. Television cameramen lined the road as Williams's hearse crept from the death house, its red emergency light circling in the darkness.

Thirteen months later, Louisiana had executed more people per capita than any state since executions resumed in 1977. But by then most everyone had lost interest. In January 1985, when David Dene Martin became the seventh man to die in Louisiana's resurrected electric chair, even the newspaper in the town where he committed his four murders failed to send a reporter. Before the first execution, dozens of reporters vied in a lottery to be one of three press witnesses allowed in the execution chamber. For the seventh, I was drafted as a witness late in the day, when one of the reporters originally selected decided the trip wasn't worth the trouble. In that judgment, he is not alone. A recent Gallup poll showed 75 percent of the public supporting executions. For most news agencies, the death penalty is no longer much of a story. "There's no interest,' a television news director told The Miami Herald last year. "The only interest would be if they pull the switch and the guy lives. If he dies, it isn't news.'

Interest in capital punishment is fading just as the business of execution is about to boom. In the first six years that followed the U.S. Supreme Court's approval of new capital punishment laws in 1976, only six people were executed--four of them with their own consent. But since the beginning of 1983, executions have proceeded at a rate of about one every three weeks. And that place promises to accelerate. More and more people are further along in their appeals. And since 1983, the federal courts have been setting policies making it easier for prosecutors to pursue death sentences.

Currently, the Supreme Court is considering a major death penalty case involving charges that the jury selection process is unfair. And in another case, attorneys have asked the Court to consider evidence suggesting racial discrimination in capital sentencing. If the Court resolves those cases in favor of the prosecution, as most legal scholars predict, it will remove the last major legal hope for many of the nation's 1,500 inmates on death now. Within several years we may be witnessing a pace of executions in the United States unequaled since the 1950s, a pace attorneys thought unimaginable as recently as a decade ago.

In the past two years, I've covered all seven Louisiana executions and witnessed one. I've interviewed about a third of the men on Louisiana's death row, including four who are now dead, and I've talked at length to their families and to the families of their victims. In addition, I've covered about a dozen murder trials and interviewed dozens of police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, legislators, and prison guards. In doing so, I've had a number of experiences that have fueled what was for me an instinctive opposition to capital punishment--and a few that have challenged that opposition. These experiences, described below, are the kind that won't be getting much attention as executions become an accepted part of American life.

No solutions

On January 5, 1979, Robert Wayne Williams killed a 67-year-old security guard with a shotgun blast to the face. Both men were black. It was Williams's first violent crime. At age 27, Williams was an eleventh-grade dropout whose life had begun to unravel: he was fighting an addiction to heroin, had lost his job, and was in a troubled marriage to a 17-year-old wife. She found him that night at a party, drunk and stoned, and told him to get in the car with her and her uncle, Ralph Holmes. They handed him a sawed-off shotgun and told him they were planning to rob an A&P grocery store they had previously cased.

Williams's wife waited in the car and he and Ralph Holmes entered the store shortly before midnight, their faces covered by ski masks. A dozen late-night shoppers fled to the rear of the store or crouched in the aisles as Williams held the shotgun on security guard Willie Kelly while Holmes attempted to remove Kelly's pistol. When the guard moved his hand toward his gun, apparently to help unbuckle the strap, Williams screamed, "Don't do it!' The shotgun went off, and Kelly slumped face down on the counter.

Williams claimed up to the time of his death that the gun discharged accidentally. It is possible; the gun was missing its firing pin, and other witnesses testified that it discharged accidentally several minutes later, when Williams laid it on the ground. The robbers escaped with $2,500 and were caught several weeks later. Williams's wife turned state's evidence and was released. Holmes got life, Williams got death.

Five years later, when I first heard of Robert Wayne Williams, he had 36 hours to live. Word of his failed court appeal caught the newsroom by surprise and an editor sent me to Baton Rouge to find William's family and the family of his victim.

When I knocked on the Williams's door at 10 that night, I was reluctant, on the one hand, to add to their grief, but hungry, on the other, to hear what they had to say. Rose Williams, the condemned man's mother, was a hospital supply clerk, and a weekend minister in the Church of God. Was she angry or resigned? Hateful or forgiving? I didn't find out that night. She said she was too tired to talk and in the middle of setting her hair for her final visit with her son the next day. If I came back early in the morning, she said, she would talk to me.

On the way to my car I bumped into 14-year-old Troy Williams, the condemned man's son. My empty notebook quickly began to fill. "Killing him just because he killed somebody else ain't solving a thing,' he said, squirmining nervously and staring at the ground. "He didn't mean to shoot him. It just isn't fair. He's a real nice guy.' I was standing in the street scribbling when the boy's aunt emerged from the house and caught me. "Didn't we ask you to leave?' she asked angrily. "Why are you violating our wishes?' I went back into the house and apologized to Rose Williams. I hadn't meant to antagonize her, I explained, I just happened to bump into her grandson. She heard me out and responded to my second intrusion simply and with dignity. "We accept your apology,' she said.

I saw Rose Williams the next morning minutes before she left for the prison for her last visit with her son. She is a small, quiet woman who projects a sense of strength. She told me that she had contacted the victim's family, hoping to gain their forgiveness, but that they didn't want to talk. She was praying, she said, and she had contacted the governor's office to make a request: in the event the execution went through, she wanted to watch. "I saw my boy come in this world,' she said. "I want to see him go out of it.' She left for the prison and I remained in the small house with Williams's other relatives, who said I was welcome to stay. Of the four Williams siblings, only Robert had seen trouble with the law. The other three had settled comfortably into jobs as a speech therapist, a carpenter, and a cabinetmaker. Despite the terrible tension of the day, they seemed open and at peace. As we sat in the living room, a television "bulletin' flashed on the screen and our heads jerked, only to see a Christmas advertisement from a furniture store. A few minutes later, a real bulletin flashed. "Condemned killer Robert Wayne Williams is scheduled to die tonight,' declared a somber newscaster before "The...