For death row inmates, 1999 is shaping up as the deadliest year ever. Ironically, it may also turn out to be one of the most hopeful. So far this year more than 50 Americans have been executed and death penalty watchers expect this year's final tally to hit 100 - the highest annual death toll since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment in 1976.
But even as states set records in putting their prisoners to death, more and more of them are questioning whether the death penalty is applied fairly and considering temporary bans to conduct in-depth studies of the issue.
In March, for example, after yet another death row inmate was exonerated, the Illinois House of Representatives voted to adopt a six-month moratorium. Nebraska lawmakers, in a move that was later vetoed by the governor, approved a two-year suspension of executions in May to determine whether minorities are disproportionately sentenced to death. And since then, at least a half dozen other states have begun discussing similar halts.

Opponents Encouraged
The moratorium movement represents an ideological shift from years past when legislators spent far more time limiting appeals and expanding the reach of the death penalty than worrying whether it was applied fairly. Now death penalty opponents are hoping all the talk is a portent of better public policy to come.

"The trend over the past 20 years has been more states with the death penalty, more crimes eligible, more executions," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "It's too early to tell whether this is a large trend away from the death penalty, but it's different than other years."

"There's a change in the public attitude on the death penalty," Steven Hawkins, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, told The New York Times. "We're very encouraged by what we're hearing in the heartland. It says something about where Middle America stands."

Death penalty advocates still argue the public wants capital punishment, pointing to national polls suggesting that up to 80 percent of voters approve of its use.
But mounting evidence that minorities and the poor make up more than their fair share of death row inmates, and - worse - that a number of them could be innocent, seems to be shaking public confidence in the measure.
Both Oklahoma and Louisiana were forced to free inmates from death row earlier this year when information emerged proving them not guilty. Illinois, after exonerating its twelfth death row prisoner in 12 years, became the first state to approve a death penalty moratorium, with House legislators voting to suspend executions for six months and establish a legislative panel to study the state's capital punishment statute.
The vote followed the February release of death row prisoners Anthony Porter, who came within 48 hours of being executed last September, and Steven Smith, whose murder conviction was tossed out by the Illinois Supreme Court in May. Although the resolution is non-binding and the state is not obligated to make changes the panel recommends, Illinois Gov. George Ryan has said he is willing to cooperate with the review of the state's statute in spite of his personal opposition to a moratorium.

"I think everybody knows what's at stake here...An innocent man was about to die, and thank God he didn't," Ryan said recently. "Now we want to make sure that scenario doesn't reappear and come back and haunt us in the future."

Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns, another moratorium opponent, is apparently less worried about such scenarios. When Nebraska's conservative unicameral legislature voted 27-21 in May to suspend executions for two years - a measure that would have made Nebraska the first state in the nation to establish a formal moratorium - Johanns promptly vetoed the bill, calling it "poor public policy" and an excuse for death row inmates to file "endless appeals."

Studies Expected to Show Bias
Nebraska legislators chose not to vote on an override of the moratorium bill. But in a unanimous 43-0 vote, the legislature overrode another Johanns' veto and reinstated up to $160,000 in funding for a study on the roles that race, gender and economic status play in sentencing convicted criminals to death.
A recent NAACP Legal Defense Study found that 82 percent of those executed between 1977 and 1998 were charged with murdering a white person even though blacks and whites were homicide victims in roughly equal numbers. In overwhelmingly white Nebraska, three of the state's ten death row prisoners are African American or American Indian.

"The people of Nebraska at any and all levels, in each and every walk of life are perfectly capable of understanding justice, and they do expect us, as guardians that they send here, to do something about the problems that are abroad in our society," said state Sen. Kermit Brashears, the pro-death penalty Republican who led the fight for both the moratorium and the study.

While neither Illinois nor Nebraska legislators successfully passed a moratorium, death penalty opponents are heartened that the issue is being discussed at all. Meanwhile, there are signs the debate is spreading. Moratorium bills were recently introduced in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina legislatures and at least a dozen other states have considered bills to abolish or halt the death penalty this year. Four states - Michigan, Maine, Massachusetts and Iowa - defeated bills that would have permitted capital punishment, and Montana legislators passed a bill this spring barring the death penalty for juveniles convicted of capital offenses. Even Texas, the state that puts more inmates to death than any other, is considering a measure outlawing the execution of the mentally retarded.
More than 450 American organizations have endorsed a moratorium of the death penalty, including the American Bar Association, which has cited the pervasive arbitrariness and discrimination in the current use of capital punishment. In 1997, NLADA's board of directors went one step further, calling for a permanent halt. "The inhumanity, arbitrariness and discrimination of the death penalty are not transient or curable, but are inherent and irretrievable," the NLADA resolution stated.
According to recent studies, about 90 percent of American criminal defendants charged with a capital crime are indigent when arrested, and nearly all of them are penniless by the time their case reaches the appeals stage. In California, the state with the largest death row population, for example, fewer than 2 percent were represented at trial by retained counsel.
Statistics also indicate that African Americans, who make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, account for 36 percent of death row inmates.
Largely because of the death penalty's disproportionate impact on the poor and on minorities, international human rights advocate Amnesty International added the U.S. to its short list of the world's worst human rights violators for the first time ever this spring. According to the report, 10 of the 19 juvenile offenders executed worldwide since 1990 were executed here.

"There are only five other countries in the world that execute people who committed crimes while they were juveniles - under age 18," William Schulz, Amnesty International's executive director, said last month. "These countries - Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria - all until recently with authoritarian governments - have notoriously abominable human rights records. It is not good company for the United States to be in."

All together, 90 nations continue to execute prisoners while 105 do not. Even Russia, long known as one of the few nations to be more punitive than the U.S., effectively abolished capital punishment in June.