a016  2335  22 Apr 87
PM-Death Penalty-Reax, Bjt,0842
Fight Over Death Penalty Not Over, Both Sides Say
By ROBERT BARR
Associated Press Writer
    The Supreme Court's refusal to rule that the death penalty is
implemented in a racist way removes the last major argument against
capital punishment, but the fight over the practice is not over,
opponents and supporters agree.
    An Oklahoma public defender predicted the 5-4 decision would unleash
a flood of executions, and the California attorney general said it
makes it more likely a death sentence will be carried out in that
state. Seventy people have been put to death in this country the
Supreme Court in 1976 allowed states to resume executions.
    While law enforcement officials welcomed Wednesday's ruling, civil
rights advocates condemned it as a disturbing return to days of
rampant racism.
    The nation's highest court rejected the appeal of a black Georgia
prisoner who offered evidence that those who kill whites in that
state are far more likely to be sentenced to death than those who
kill blacks.
    Justice Lewis F. Powell, writing for the court, said attorneys for
Warren McCleskey had not proved that there was any racial bias in his
case.
    ''That's very, very good news,'' said Mark Rotert, head of criminal
appeals for the Illinois attorney general. ''We're going to have one
less issue to resolve in capital litigation.''
    ''This decision is a throwback to the days of slavery and Jim Crow,
when it was murder to kill a white but not murder to kill a black,''
said Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. ''(A) majority of the
Supreme Court has become part of a lynch mob which is encouraging
racist injustice.''
    ''It will open the floodgates. I would not be surprised if we had
100 to 150 executions between now and the end of the year,'' said Bob
Ravitz, chief public defender for Oklahoma County, Okla.
    ''There are now no issues left before the Supreme Court that would
hold up executions. So all executions are going to go forward,'' said
Ron Dusek, spokesman for Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox. Texas has
250 prisoners under death sentences.
    David Whitmore, legal director for the American Civil Liberties
Union in New Orleans, said nearly a dozen of the 47 inmates on
Louisiana's death row had staked their hopes for survival on the
McCleskey case.
    McCleskey, who is black, was convicted of murdering a white Atlanta
police officer in 1978.
    ''This was the last broad-based issue that the court needed to
address, but it by no means means that death-penalty opponents will
be stymied in finding some other issue to raise,'' said Jim Coman, a
senior deputy attorney general for North Carolina.
    ''There will be another issue that will replace the white victim
issue,'' Coman said. ''I just don't know what it will be.''
    ''It won't speed up anything, but that's one more issue they can't
use now,'' said Jack Morris, who handles death sentence cases for the
attorney general's office in Missouri.
    In California, Attorney General John Van de Kamp said the court's
action ''undoubtedly will have an impact on all death penalty cases
in California.''
    If the decision had gone the other way, ''it would be very
questionable whether we could ever have a death penalty in Georgia,''
state Attorney General Michael Bowers said Wednesday. He said he will
move swiftly to seek new execution orders for four or five death-row
prisoners whose appeals have been exhausted.
    ''I do not expect wholesale executions, but I do think, sadly
enough, that we are going to get back in the business of killing
people, not only in this state but in states throughout the South,''
said George Kendall, an ACLU attorney in Atlanta.
    ''It is our hope that in another day, in another case, that the
dissent in this case, which spoke so eloquently about the sad history
of racism, we'll get five or six of those votes and end this nonsense
once and for all.''
    The Rev. Tim McDonald, coordinator of special projects for the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, called for civil
disobedience ''to totally disrupt the legal system and to put a
screeching halt to that machinery that continues to grind up lives as
if they're animals.''
    Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, called the decision deeply
disturbing, but said the court must be obeyed.
    ''I suppose we'll have to try to find another case where the facts
are better and will more dramatically illustrate what we're trying to
prove,'' Hooks said.
    ''For the moment, it will be an end to the constitutional claim that
race is an impermissibly significant element in death-penalty
decision-making, but it is not the end of the fight,'' said Henry
Schwarzchild, director of the ACLU's capital punishment project.
    ''What it does is tell people there won't be any major movement away
from the death penalty in quite a while,'' said Lester Bower, an
inmate on Texas' death row. ''They've shut the door for quite a while
and it'll take a pretty good crowbar to get the door open.''
    
AP-NY-04-23-87 0234EDT
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