PULL THE PLUG

Delma Banks Jr. had eaten his last meal and, in a controlled panic, was
starting to count off the final 10 minutes of his life when word came
last March 12 that his execution was being postponed because the
Supreme Court might want to review his case.

Last Monday the court decided that yes, it would hear Mr. Banks's
appeal. This should throw a brighter spotlight on a case that embodies
many of the important things that are wrong with the death penalty in
the United States.

Here are just some of the problems. There is no good evidence that Mr.
Banks, who was accused of killing a 16-year-old boy in a small town in
Texas in 1980, is guilty. A complete reading of the record, including
facts uncovered during his appeals, shows that he is most likely
innocent.

There is irrefutable evidence of gross prosecutorial misconduct. The
key witnesses against Mr. Banks were hard-core drug addicts who had
much to gain from lying. One was a paid informer, and the other was a
career felon who was told that a pending arson charge would be dropped
if he performed "well" while testifying against Mr. Banks. The special
incentives given to the two men for their testimony were improperly
concealed by prosecutors. Both witnesses have since recanted.

And, as in so many capital cases, the race issue runs through this one
like a fatal virus. Mr. Banks, who had no prior criminal record and has
steadfastly proclaimed his innocence, is black. The victim, the
prosecutors and all the carefully selected jurors were white.

It is time to pull the plug on the death penalty in the United States.
Shut it down. It is never going to work properly. There are too many
passions and prejudices involved (and far too many incompetent lawyers,
prosecutors, judges and jurors) for it to ever be administered with any
consistent degree of fairness and justice.

A Columbia University study released last year documented
extraordinarily high percentages of death penalty cases that had been
tainted by "egregiously incompetent" defense lawyers, by police
officers and prosecutors who had suppressed exculpatory evidence, by
jurors who had been misinformed about the law, and by judges and jurors
who were biased.

A study on race and the death penalty in the U.S. that is being
released today by Amnesty International notes the following:

"Since 1976, blacks have been six to seven times more likely to be
murdered than whites, with the result that blacks and whites are the
victims of murder in about equal numbers. Yet 80 percent of the more
than 840 people put to death in the U.S.A. since 1976 were convicted of
crimes involving white victims, compared to the 13 percent who were
convicted of killing blacks."

The Amnesty report asserts, correctly, that studies have consistently
found that the criminal justice system "places a higher value on white
life than on black life."

The mishandling of the Banks case by local prosecutors led three former
federal judges, including William Sessions, a former director of the
F.B.I., to urge the Supreme Court to intervene and block the execution.
"The questions presented in Mr. Banks's petition directly implicate the
integrity of the administration of the death penalty in this country,"
the judges wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief. "The prosecutors in
this case concealed important impeachment material from the defense. In
addition, the district court found, and the court of appeals agreed,
that Mr. Banks received ineffective assistance from his lawyer, at
least in the penalty phase of his trial."

None of these issues mattered to the state of Texas, which was ready
and oh-so-willing to kill this man at 6 p.m. on March 12, and is still
ready and willing to do so.

When state officials have no qualms about executing people even though
there are clear doubts about their guilt and about whether they have
been treated fairly by the justice system, it's time to bring the
curtain down on their ability to execute anyone.

The Supreme Court will examine just a few very specific aspects of the
Banks case. It will not, for example, address the race issue. But the
death penalty is a rotten edifice, and you will find terrible problems
no matter where you look.

Lying witnesses. Lousy lawyers. Corrupt prosecutors. Racism.

The death penalty is broken and can't be fixed. Get rid of it.