The justice ain't no use; why the death penalty won't work in D.C.

Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

Why the death penalty won't work in D. C

The record-setting murder rate that has gained Washington top network billing has many city residents nervous, and I'm one of them. I frequently walk home late-past midnight-though lately I've been doing so less often and with greater unease. The bars were shutting down for the night a few months ago when my walk home took me past two speeding automobiles, with someone leaning out of the second and firing a gun at the first. It happened so suddenly that my ears kept insisting it was only a backfire, though my eyes, like those of other sidewalk gawkers, knew it was the real thing. Climbing into a taxi the next week, I gave the driver my address, only to have him explain that the corner outside my house had been the scene of a recent murder.

I was flipping the radio dial a few months ago when I caught a talk-show guest who suggested he had the solution to the District's crime problem: executions. The speaker was Gary Hankins of the D.C. Fraternal Order of Police, and he isn't confining his campaign to late-night radio. The E.O.P. has asked the city council to establish a death penalty for those who murder in order to advance another criminal activity-rape, say, or robbery, or (especially) the distribution of drugs. "It's not going to deter people ftom killing in anger," Hankins conceded. "[But] it will deter, I am convinced that it will deter, people who kill because of an assessment of human life versus profits in illegal activities." Criminals, Hankins said, know that "there is no chance of being executed in the District-none."

While, as a police officer, Hankins no doubt knows more about criminals than I do, the idea that "there is no chance of being executed in the District" is a strange one. After all, there have already been more than 130 murders in the District this year, and about half of them were drug-related-many "execution-style." By contrast, we've had only 107 executions in all of the United States during the past 20 years.

Little hangmen

Not only is the District's privately operated death penalty more prolific than the run-of-the-mill, legislated kind, it's also more swift and sure. No lengthy appeals. No last-minute whining from the ACLU. What's more, the executions take place in full public view, where the death penalty's didactic value is highest. This, after all, is what Hankins and others say they During some of the 19th century here, public executions and hangings were indeed well-attended," Hankins said. "Vendors sold little hangmen, and it was quite a spectacle. And it worked'" Now, D.C. residents don't even have to hassle with the crowds to see the corpses; they can just turn on the nightly news.

Oddly enough, though, for all its dispatch, ruthlessness, and visibility, D.C.'s privatized death penalty doesn't seem to be acting as much of a deterrent. Scientifically, of course, this is awfully hard to prove. Lots of people in Washington haven't committed a murder during a drug deal this year, and it's entirely possible that some of them haven't done so for fear of reprisal-deterrence. What is clear, however, is that record numbers of people are stealing and dealing drugs, even though the threat of death has never been greater.

Maybe the city's drug dealers and enforcers think themselves invulnerable to the violence all around them. Maybe they think they'll die and don't particularly care. Maybe they care but can't extricate themselves from it. Whichever, it's hard to see how adding a legislative death penalty to the de facto one that rules the streets will induce new rectitude.

As a case in point, consider the short life of Darryl Murchison, who at age 23 was one of the District's more accomplished drug hoodlums. In March, a teenage associate chased him into an alley and executed him with a shotgun. Murchison must have known it was coming. For the past two years, according to Sari Horwitz of The Washington Post, he'd been a leader in a drug gang whose battle with a rival operation had left 20 people dead. In 1987, he and 10 other young men were wounded by a spray of gunfire as they walked out of a go-go concert. (One, of them died.) Six months later, he was shot again in an attack that killed a close friend as they sat in a car. While Murchison may not have feared the courts-he'd been arrested twice in the past year for selling coke and crack, and released pending trial-he had ample evidence that curbside death threats were credible.

In lobbying for the death penalty, Hankins told the talk-radio host that without it, "these kids. . .know there is no chance that they're gonna burn for what they're doing." On the contrary, had Darryl Murchison and his companions thought much about the future-not one of their favorite pasttimes, it seems-they would have surmised that the odds of being burned are pretty high. Supplementing the illegal executions with legal ones might make some of us feel better, but it's not likely to make my walk home any safer.