Stop the Killing Machine.

Anyone who pays attention to the death penalty can feel it. A sea change is under way. Support for the death penalty has fallen to its lowest point in years. It now stands at 63 percent, down from 77 percent five years ago, according to the latest available poll. However, that drops to 46 percent when life in prison is offered as an option. Last September, a bipartisan study showed that 64 percent would favor a moratorium on further executions until "issues of fairness can be resolved."

But the numbers tell only so much. The cultural shift on the death penalty is going on in kitchens and neighborhoods and factories and offices and press rooms across the country, where people are talking about it as they have not since 1976, the year the Supreme Court lifted its ban on executions. Many are looking at capital punishment with newfound horror and sudden doubts.

Among the doubters, some surprises:

Pat Robertson, the rightwing Christian conservative and former Presidential candidate, has called for a federal moratorium on the death penalty. Robertson's reason? He says that capital punishment is discriminatory, unfairly affecting minorities and those who are too poor to pay for good lawyers.

George Will, the conservative columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post, warns that "careless or corrupt administration of capital punishment" appears to be "intolerably common."

Even President George W. Bush seems to have had second--or first--thoughts on the subject. On June 11, Bush said, "We should never execute anybody who is mentally retarded." As numerous papers reported, the statement led to some confusion about what Bush really believed. As governor of Texas, he opposed bills that would have stopped executions of mentally retarded people, and at least a few of the 152 people whose deaths he oversaw had very low IQs.

While the American public examines its conscience, the U.S. capital punishment system is an enormous embarrassment overseas.

Until recently, U.S. executions got much more attention abroad than they did here. "An average person in France," reported The New York Times, "could not help but be familiar with the case of Betty Lou Beets," who was executed in Texas in February of last year for killing her fifth husband. "Her story, with particular attention to her assertion that she was abused by her father and husbands, has been on the front page of many newspapers."

The same was true, said the Times, of Odell Barnes. French editorialists had penned columns questioning whether Barnes was innocent, and the mayor of Paris even traveled to Texas to meet him. Barnes was executed in March of last year.

In the past few months, the moral isolation of the United States has grown more glaring almost by the day. In April, the United Nations Human Rights Commission called for a global moratorium "with a view to completely abolishing the death penalty." The proposal was put forward by the European Union. The vote was 27 to 18, with the United States, along with Japan, China, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, voting against.

Then, in late June, the Council of Europe, the continent's forty-three-nation human rights group, voted to remove Japan and the United States as observers unless they call a moratorium on executions "without delay" and begin a formal repeal of the death penalty.

"The debate at the Council of Europe is further evidence that the credibility of the U.S. on human rights issues has reached a new low point," said Ajamu Baraka, acting director of Amnesty International USA's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty. "The U.S.'s reputation continues to be tarnished by its defiant and puzzling commitment to a punishment that has no deterrent effect and that the majority of the world's nations has abandoned as barbaric and outdated."

A few days later, the World Court ruled that the United States had violated the Vienna Convention in a death penalty case involving Karl and Walter LaGrand, both German nationals who were executed in 1999. Neither of the LaGrands was informed of his right to seek assistance from the German consul upon arrest.

More than ninety foreign citizens from thirty-three nations are reportedly under death sentences in the United States, according to Amnesty International. In most of these cases, says Amnesty, local authorities failed to inform the prisoners upon detention of their right to consular notification and assistance--"in glaring violation of the Vienna Convention." In the past ten years, at least fourteen foreign nationals who were not informed of their consular rights have been executed here in the United States.

In mid-June, Frank Keating, the governor of Oklahoma, granted a thirty-day reprieve to a Mexican national named Gerardo Valdez. Valdez, like the LaGrands, was not told of his right to contact his consulate upon arrest. Keating later criticized the legal standard for capital punishment in Oklahoma as "too low."

It is becoming increasingly evident that those who are leery of the death penalty have reason for skepticism. The last-minute news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had withheld thousands of pages of documents from Timothy McVeigh's attorneys spoiled what should have been the strongest possible argument for capital punishment. This bungling drew attention to the fact that prosecutors often withhold documents, and that in cases with less media scrutiny than The United States vs. McVeigh, such a violation might never be discovered. "If the FBI could fail to turn over documents in a case this important, think what happens in the thousands of lesser cases where the death penalty is also meted out," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

The error rate in capital cases is astounding. In June, a Columbia University study revealed that "two out of three [death penalty] convictions were overturned on appeal, mostly because of serious errors by incompetent defense lawyers or overzealous police officers and prosecutors who withheld evidence."

But access to appeals can vary drastically by region. "In Alabama and Georgia ... these is no guarantee of a lawyer after the direct appeal of a conviction, and prisoners have only inconsistent access to a legal process that frequently overturns death sentences," The New York Times reported on June 16. Even more disturbing, "Thirty prisoners on Alabama's death row have no lawyers to pursue appeals, by far the largest such group in any state."

Much of the media attention surrounding the McVeigh execution looked at the reactions of the family members of McVeigh's victims, many of whom decided not to watch the execution. Others, however, did watch--some of them in the hope of closure, others in the desire to see McVeigh suffer for his crime. Paul Howell, whose daughter Karen died in the blast, said he wished that the survivors could have stoned McVeigh to death. "I kind of thought what they ought to do, bring him down here and get all the family members, survivors, together and start just throwing small rocks and just keep getting bigger and bigger until somebody does kill him with it," he said prior to the execution.

But some who hoped for vengeance reported feeling unsatisfied after the execution.

This is common. "More often than not, families of murder victims do not experience the relief they expected to feel at the execution, says Lula Redmond, a Florida therapist who works with such families," U.S. News & World Report said in a June 1997 article. "`Taking a life doesn't fill that void, but it's generally not until after the execution [that the families] realize this,'" Redmond said.

Helen Prejean--the author of Dead Man Walking, which was turned into a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn--stresses how illusory the relief is. She tells of a father who insisted on seeing the execution of the man who murdered his daughter. Once it was over, he said: "The S.O.B. died too quick. I hope he burns in hell." Prejean notes, "He could have watched him die a thousand, thousand times," and that still would not have healed his loss.

Eight days after McVeigh's execution, the federal government was at it again. The government had gone nearly four decades without any executions, but then in June it put two people to death. The second victim of federally sanctioned murder was Juan Raul Garza.

Garza's fate raises further questions about the U.S. death penalty. His lawyers, in an attempt to stay his execution, pointed out that eighteen of the twenty men on federal death row at the time were black or Hispanic.

Janet Reno had expressed doubts about the fairness of the federal death penalty during her tenure as U.S. Attorney General. Last September, she said she was disturbed by a Department of Justice report that mentioned the large numbers of minorities on federal death row. She ordered an investigation "to determine if bias does, in fact, play any role in the federal death penalty system."

On June 6, however, current Attorney General John Ashcroft brushed aside Reno's concerns with a new report claiming the federal death penalty is applied fairly, though he acknowledged that a more systematic study was necessary.

Ashcroft's haste to execute before the lengthier study was done is inexcusable. And his own report is shoddy. It fails to grasp the basic question of whether minorities are more likely to be charged with federal capital offenses than whites are. "The Ashcroft report purports to study this issue without looking at the much larger universe of cases in which federal charges could have been filed but were not.... For all we know, there were so many white defendants with cases just as suitable for federal capital prosecution as the minority defendants who were charged, or more so," wrote Samuel R. Gross in an op-ed for the Progressive Media Project. Gross is a professor of law at the University of Michigan and co-author of Death and Discrimination: Racial Disparities in Capital Sentencing (Northeastern, 1989). He criticized Ashcroft's assertion that the racial imbalance occurred because federal courts target crimes associated with drugs and that "organized drug trafficking is largely carried out by gangs whose membership is drawn from minority groups." Gross said, "This explanation has a depressingly familiar ring" of racial profiling about it.

In federal capital cases, blacks and whites are often treated differently. As the Chicago Tribune recently reported, "White defendants are more likely than black defendants to work out plea bargains saving them from the death penalty in federal cases, according to an analysis of 146 cases prosecuted since Congress reinstated federal capital punishment in 1988."

And evidence that courts punish people more harshly for murders of whites than of blacks is also stark. A study of the death penalty in North Carolina released this year found that the likelihood of landing on death row was much higher if the victim was white and the perpetrator was nonwhite.

Jack Boger, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, examined 3,990 homicide cases. He found that 11.6 percent of nonwhite defendants charged with murdering white victims were sentenced to death versus 6.1 percent of whites who murdered whites and 4.7 percent of nonwhites whose victims were nonwhite.

These results are nothing new. A 1998 study released by the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., found that blacks in capital cases in Philadelphia were almost four times as likely to be sentenced to death as whites in similar cases. It also said there is a "disturbing and consistent" pattern of imposing the death penalty much more often when the victims are white.

This bias is not lost on Prejean. "When people of color are killed, when poor people are killed, when `the nobodies' of this society are killed, there is no big quest to pursue the ultimate punishment to avenge their deaths," she says.

Then there is the bogus claim of deterrence.

During the Presidential campaign, Bush said that the only reason he was in favor of the death penalty was because it is a deterrent. But it isn't. The most striking recent evidence to emerge on this front comes from a September 2000 article by Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden in The New York Times. The piece showed that the twelve states that have not enacted the death penalty since it became legal in 1976 have not had higher rates of murder than those states with the death penalty. More revealing yet, the study also found that "homicide rates had risen and fallen along roughly symmetrical paths in the states with and without the death penalty.

The death penalty is biased against the poor and against racial minorities. It is arbitrary. It is capricious. It is cruel. It should be banned.

Even in especially heinous cases, such as that of Timothy McVeigh, where the guilt is beyond question, capital punishment is an abomination and an absurdity. If it's wrong for the murderer to kill, it's wrong for the state to kill the murderer.