Dems may get boxed in on death penalty

Ihave been studying death penalty politics (as well as law) for decades, largely because I’ve had to. The death penalty bedeviled Democratic candidates in the ’80s and ’90s, and its repercussions are still felt today. Back then, the public was for it. But it was more than that. Law and order, Nixon’s 1968 rallying cry, turned crime into a race issue, pure and simple. Willie Horton turned crime into a values issue. Same thing, really. Whose side are you on?

A lot of bad laws got passed by Democrats desperate not to be called soft on crime. States rushed to perfect their death penalty laws, and cases became almost routine. But there were enough high-profile mistakes and enough stories about how death row was actually more expensive than execution that support began to drop for the death penalty in America.

So why, you might ask, with public opinion turning against the death penalty,

did Attorney General William Barr announce last month that the federal government would be resuming the practice on Dec. 9, with four more executions scheduled after that leading up to the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries?

Simple: Because the death penalty is not just a theoretical question. I’ve long been against the death penalty; I know the criminal justice system’s weakness too well. But when I was very pregnant and a murderer was caught on camera shooting a pregnant mother right through the stomach and the cops caught him and we watched the video, we were ready to kill him ourselves.

The first man scheduled to die on Dec. 9 is a white supremacist with a swastika on his throat. He broke into a family’s home in Arkansas in 1996 and suffocated the father, the mother and the 8-year-old daughter before throwing their bodies in the bayou, where they were found six months later.

Then there’s Wesley Purkey, who kidnapped a 16-year-old in Kansas, took her to his house, raped her repeatedly, killed her and then dismembered and burned her body. Earlier, he had used a hammer to kill an 80-year-old woman suffering from polio. He is scheduled to die on Dec. 13.

Alfred Bourgeois tortured and killed his 2-year-old daughter. His own daughter. Continuous torture. Save Alfred?

Dustin Honken killed two men who planned to testify against him, as well as one of the men’s girlfriends and her 6- and 10-year-old daughters. His execution is scheduled for Jan. 15. Save Dustin?

The problem with the death penalty is that it’s easy to be against it until confronted with the most heinous evil you can contemplate. And in those moments, I think, the flip in the polls reflects the tensions in our hearts, not disrespect for life but holding it in the highest reverence.

You can’t just say, “No, I’m against the death penalty” — as Michael Dukakis did at Polley Pavillion in 1988. You can’t start quoting me numbers when I’m thinking of this man killing his daughter, this pregnant woman just like me standing at the ATM machine, holding her hands over her stomach to protect her baby.

This is what Trump wants us to be talking about in the days leading up to the primaries. If he succeeds, we may end up sounding as out of touch with America as a good man did in Los Angles when asked whether he would support the death penalty for his wife’s murderer.

Susan Estrich is a law professor at USC and Democratic activist.