Life or death in Wisconsin.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Capital punishment bill - Cover Story

Wisconsin has had no death penalty for 142 years, longer than any other state in the Union--possibly longer than any nation in the world. That streak will end this year if Republican State Senator Alan Lasee has his way Lasee has been introducing death-penalty bills in the state legislature annually for the last eighteen years. The bills, pegged to a series of grisly murder cases, always focus on particularly heinous acts. His latest effort, Senate Bill 1, comes on the heels of the murder of Cora Jones, a ten-year-old girl in northwest Wisconsin. It applies only to defendants over the age of sixteen who willfully murder children. At last count, the bill is just a few votes short of passage.

"It's a foot in the door," says Dean Strang, chair of the death-penalty project of the state bar's criminal-law section. "He's starting with people who murder kids--who could argue with that? Then, sooner or later, somebody blows up a post office, so you tack that on. It's a pretty canny strategy."

In 1853, the citizens of Wisconsin were so appalled by a gruesome public hanging that the Senate voted to ban capital punishment outright. Abolitionists argued that the death penalty was used disproportionately against the poor, that executions "harden" those who witness them, and that they are "a relic of a barbarous age." The arguments haven't changed much in the last century and a half.

The idea that a legal system imperfect as ours is going to have the pretense to use a perfect penalty is very troubling," says Strang. "But in the end it's simply barbaric. Are we progressing or regressing? That's what it's about. Are we a civilized people or not?"

For Lasee and fellow sponsors of Senate Bill 1, who have been holding hearings around the state featuring emotional testimony by the families of murder victims, the issue is simply vengeance.

"I'm not an expert on inmate behavior or a criminologist. I'm just a farmer who got elected to the Senate and I represent 150,000 constituents," Lasee says. "I think the public is fed up. For too long we've seen a criminal-justice system that treats criminals better than their own victims."

As the rationale behind criminal sentencing shifts from reform to retribution, the death penalty's popularity is on the rise. In 1994 there were almost twice as many people executed in the United States as in other recent years. After a twenty-year battle, New York recently became the thirty-eighth state to revive the death penalty. Out of...