Capital Punishment Is Constitutional

For long anxious months, the 83 in mates of death row at California's San Quentin prison waited for the State Supreme Court to rule upon the appeals of Frederick Saterfield and Robert Page Anderson. Both convicted murderers were challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty, and they could hardly have picked a more promising time or place for their plea. Their lawyers could argue with considerable authority that Western society has come to look upon execution as a cruel and unusual form of punishment. And the California court could be expected to listen sympathetically; it has earned a reputation as one of the most liberal in the nation.

To the dismay of death row, the court ruled 4 to 3 last week that capital punishment is constitutional. Vainly the three dissenters argued that the death penalty should be struck down because California law offers no guidelines to help juries decide whether a convicted man should go to prison or the gas chamber. "If a civilized society cannot say why one man should be executed and another not," replied the dissenting opinion written by Justice Mathew Tobriner, "it does not rationally, logically take life. Instead, it grossly denies due process of law, inflicting death on the basis of a trial that is capricious, discriminatory and guess-infected." In reply, the majority pointed out that there are safeguards against arbitrary jury action.

When considering a motion for a new trial, for example, the judge may change a death sentence to life imprisonment.

The convicted man may also seek a Governor's pardon.

Avoiding the Gas Chamber. Though the decision was a setback for foes of capital punishment all over the country, it did not start a parade to the gas chamber. In fact, the court ruled that Saterfield and Anderson should get another hearing on their sentences because persons who oppose the death penalty had been kept off their juries.

Basing their order on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, the judges said that opponents of capital punishment may be excluded only when they admit that they would automatically vote against the death penalty, or that their views might influence their opinion of the defendant's guilt.

California's condemned men (and one woman), all of whom enjoyed a 17-month stay of execution while the cases were being decided, are sure to use the Anderson-Saterfield ruling for new petitions of their own. Under last week's decision, those who cannot afford lawyers are now entitled to have one provided for every plea. Thus, if the deathrow inmates do not get their sentences revised, at least they will avoid the gas chamber a while longer.

California was not the only state to uphold the death penalty last week, turning down an appeal from Richard Speck, who was convicted last year of stabbing and strangling eight nurses to death in a Chicago dormitory, the Illinois Supreme Court denied that Speck's death sentence is cruel and unusual punishment. It also rebuffed his attorneys' efforts to prove that Speck was not sane at the time of the murders and that opponents of the death penalty had been rejected as jurors when the jury was picked for his trial.

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