POOR EXECUTION ON FACTS; U.N.'S CRITICISM OF AMERICA'S USE OF DEATH PENALTY IGNORES MILLIONS SPENT ON PROTECTING MURDERERS' RIGHTS; UNDERMINES U.S. SOVEREIGNTY.

Byline: Jonathan S. Shapiro Local View

UNWELCOME advice is never appreciated.

It is especially irksome when it is based on ignorance.

In an allegedly unbiased report issued last week by its Human Rights Commission and supported by a majority of its member states, the United Nations concluded that the United States should abolish the death penalty. Scolding America for applying capital punishment unfairly to the poor and to minorities, the U.N. Commission, in essence, accused Americans of murder.

Specifically, the U.N. criticized the U.S. for giving too much power to victims in determining punishment, and not enough consideration to the rights of murderers. As usual, the U.N. convicted the U.S. of atrocities, then held a trial.

The report itself was a sham. Preparation of the report began in September 1997, a full five months after the Human Rights Commission passed a resolution urging the nations of the world to abolish the death penalty. After concluding that capital punishment was wrong everywhere, the U.N. then proceeded to study the question in the U.S.

If its institutional bias against capital punishment were not enough to stack the deck, the U.N. Commission then appointed attorney Waly Bacre Ndiaye of Senegal to write the report. Ndiaye is a former official of Amnesty International, an organization devoted to the abolition of the death penalty.

Lest anyone believe that his report would be impartial, Ndiaye announced last year that Americans made a habit of executing the mentally incompetent and those found guilty in racially biased trials. That these claims were baseless did not matter. The U.S. State Department gave Ndiaye unfettered access to prisons in California and elsewhere, far more cooperation than Ndiaye received when he traveled to the Congo or Sri Lanka on fact-finding missions. But facts were not allowed to hinder what was a foregone conclusion.

Now that the report is finished, the U.N. ought to learn the truth about capital punishment in America. Then it ought to mind its own business.

The U.S. has the finest criminal justice system in the world.

The O.J. Simpson case and other rare travesties aside, it remains the model upon which emerging democracies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have created their own modern penal codes. No other nation affords its citizenry greater protections. No other nation's criminals enjoy greater guarantees. Other nations may have played a historic role in creating the notion of due process. But America is the founding nation in regard to fairness to criminals.

We have nothing to apologize for when it comes to administering our laws. Indeed, enlightened criminal procedure is so important to Americans that they enshrined it in their Constitution over 200 years ago.

Consider what the Bill of Rights promises. Defendants have the right to know the charges against them, to have a public trial accessible to a free press, to have a jury of one's peers and to have a competent attorney.

Some of the nations that endorsed the report condemning the U.S., including Colombia, Malawi and Estonia, to name a few, do not come close to offering such protections. Defendants can stay silent in the face of government charges, and their silence is not to be held against them. Not even England has such a written right.

And no defendant can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment - nations that practice torture, including a few that voted to condemn the U.S., can't say that.

When it comes to the death penalty, the U.S. is obsessed with fairness.

We spends millions of dollars to allow condemned criminals to appeal their sentences on the most technical of grounds. The nation's best and brightest lawyers, investigators and judges devote years to poring over records to ensure the justness of the punishment. Neither Senegal, Greece nor the other nations that supported the U.N. report have similar justice systems or resources to ensure the ultimate rightness of their country's verdicts.

For an organization that purportedly supports national self-determination, the U.N. seems very content to tell Americans how to run their affairs.

Is the death penalty morally defensible? That is for the people of individual nations to decide. If the U.N. ruled the world, it would strike down capital punishment here and elsewhere.

But that is not how democracy works. The voters of California and every other state choose for themselves if criminals should die. They do so based on their belief in the appropriateness of the punishment and their faith that it is administered fairly. No despot or tyrant operates the death chamber. Right or wrong, the people of the U.S. do.

It is not for other nations to decide for the people of the U.S., anymore then it is appropriate for the U.S. to decide for them. Neither Mexico nor Canada have a death penalty. Both nations have balked at extraditing murderers back to the U.S. to face possible execution. If the U.S. dared tell its neighbors to impose the death penalty, if it suggested that it was appropriate to destroy monsters for the greater good of society, it would be accused of the worst kind of imperialism, of trying to force its world view on weaker nations. Yet when Mali and Italy and the other nations that supported the report on capital punishment tell us what to do, we are supposed to listen.

The U.N. turns 50 this year. That's old enough to know better than to side with murderers. But old habits die hard for an organization that has long embraced nations that practice terror as a political means. America, the largest single contributor to the U.N.'s budget, ought to consider whether, in light of pressing needs in this country, it really has to continue paying for such bad advice.

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PHOTO After concluding that capital punishment is wrong everywhere, the U.N. decided to study the question in the United States.