Word: alabamas
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...poster boy for capital punishment--perhaps the most effective since Ted Bundy--McVeigh is causing so much discussion that "it's as if we have not had a death penalty until now," says Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, a nonprofit organization that represents capital defendants. Foes of the death penalty find this troubling, since McVeigh's case is so unusual, but they should be grateful to him for reopening a debate that was essentially over in America. Three-quarters of the public--along with the Congress, the President and the courts--is solidly in favor...
...Alabama, 69% of those executed since 1976 were black. In Georgia the figure is 55%. Even though blacks are more likely than whites to be the victim of homicide, the overwhelming majority of capital cases involve crimes committed against people who are white. The disparity was attacked in a landmark 1987 case, McClesky v. Kemp. Warren McClesky, a black man convicted of killing a white police officer in Georgia, based his appeal on a study that showed killers of white people were four times as likely to get the death penalty as killers of nonwhites. That wasn't enough...
...exceptions include Iran, Iraq, China, Yemen and some former Soviet states--Americans seem to want more of them, with fewer appeals and delays. Thanks to Congress and the courts, they're getting their wish--especially in the "Death Belt" states of Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama, which together account for 78% of the executions America has seen since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty...
...Alabama has been doing doing its bit to hit the target. The state implemented measures to speed up execution of some of the 153 people on death row, even threatening to set execution dates for those who have not completed their appeals. So far this year, the state has put just four men to death, but even with such limited numbers, there is a no-big-deal sense to the proceedings. "We keep it real low-key," says veteran corrections officer Charles Bodiford...
Last Friday at 12:10 a.m., it was Henry Francis Hays' turn to die. His execution was cause for some self-congratulation in Alabama because, unlike most of those who have been put to death before him, Hays is white. What's more, he is the son of a Ku Klux Klan leader who, the prosecution said, ordered him to lynch a black as a "show of strength" in 1981, after a jury failed to convict a black man accused of killing a white police officer. Hays and a friend snatched 19-year-old Michael Donald off a Mobile street...