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It is our earnest hope that APA's Board of Trustees and Assembly will take a bold stand in the matter of the abolition of capital punishment in this country. Notwithstanding the belief of a large majority of American citizens that the death penalty should be maintained as an ultimate punishment for certain convicted criminals, it is important for professional organizations such as APA to show leadership when fundamental moral issues are at stake.
It is to be noted that the American Bar Association last year called for a moratorium on capital punishment in the United States. The reasons for the ABA's position include the racially discriminatory application of the death penalty, the grossly inadequate legal representation of defendants, and the restrictions on appeals to the federal courts even in cases where new evidence is presented that points to the innocence of the condemned prisoner.
The late retired Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., in a 1991 interview, expressed his doubt whether the death penalty could be administered in a way that was truly fair and stated that, in retrospect, his greatest regret was that he had voted to uphold the constitutionality of capital punishment.
Justice Harry A. Blackmun, too, spoke out in favor of the abolition of the death penalty. Just prior to his retirement in 1994 he declared that he would no longer "tinker with the machinery of death" and stated that, in practice, the capital punishment system was incurably capricious, unfair, and rife with inevitable "factual, legal, and moral error."
Had they voted in death penalty cases before the Supreme Court in line with their subsequent positions, the 5-4 decisions affirming capital punishment would have gone the other way, and the death penalty would have been eliminated.
The words of Louis Jolyon West, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, written a quarter of a century ago, are every bit as pertinent today as they were then:
"Capital punishment is outdated, immoral, wasteful, cruel, brutalizing, unfair, irrevocable, useless, dangerous, and obstructive of justice. In addition, psychiatric observations reveal that it generates disease through the torture of death row; it perverts the identity of physicians from trials to prison wards to executions; and, paradoxically, it breeds more murder than it deters."
Abraham L. Halpern, M.D.
Mamaroneck, N.Y.
Alfred M. Freedman, M.D.
New York, N.Y.