Violence at the top.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: Bill Clinton and the death penalty - Editorial

Fielding Dawson, a reader in New York City who is passionately concerned - as we all should be - about the crime of capital punishment, wrote a letter to Bill Clinton asking the President to do what he could to spare the life of Gary Graham, a young African-American who is scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on August 17.

According to Leigh Dingerson, executive director of the Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, "Graham could be considered a poster-person for the abolition movement. No case in recent memory has raised more clearly the intrinsic failures of the death penalty." (Graham was one of the founders of a newspaper called Endeavor: Live Voices from Death Row, on which we reported in the June 1990 issue of The Progressive.)

There is substantial doubt that Graham committed the murder of which he was convicted twelve years ago, but he failed to win even a hearing on new evidence submitted by his lawyers. Among those who have asked for clemency are the wife and stepdaughter of Graham's supposed victim. Graham was seventeen at the time of the crime, and his age, his race, and the failure of the judicial process are all reasons for challenging the death sentence.

"Yet Governor Ann Richards has refused to budge," Dingerson wrote recently.

"In fact, Governor Richards has now carried out the executions of more men than any governor in the country in the post-Furman era. She's taken the politics of death to a new level, with barely a squeak of protest from the Democratic Party that adores her or the many progressive communities which elected her."

Furman was the 1972 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled against the "arbitrary and freakish" application of the death penalty. It took about four years - four years blessedly free of state-imposed homicide - for state legislatures to devise and enact capital-punishment statutes that would meet the Supreme Court's test of constitutionality. There has been an orgy of executions ever since.

Bill Clinton's reply to Fielding Dawson - on White House stationery and bearing what appears to be the President's signature - begins by asserting, "In state cases such as Gary Graham's, there is no legal basis for the President to intervene to prevent an execution. National involvement in state cases is constrained by our federal system."

That's true as...