20 Times Life

The all-white Oklahoma City jury took only six minutes to decide on a guilty verdict for the black man accused of abducting and raping a white woman at knife point. It took longer to set the penalty, which Oklahoma juries must also do. After two hours, the eleven men and one woman finally agreed. The astonishing sentence for Charles Callins, 22, an ex-con with no previous sex offenses on his record: 1,500 years, the longest known prison term for a single offense ever ordered in the U.S.

The gigantic sentence was the latest indication of a growing trend in the Southwest. In September, two Oklahoma blacks were sentenced to 500 years each for assaulting a white woman; in October, a similar Oklahoma conviction drew 1,000 years. Juries in neighboring Texas have also meted out sentences of 1,000 and 1,001 years.

In the Callins case, the prosecutor asked for the death penalty, calling a life term "just a slap on the wrist." But the jurors knew that execution is rarely carried out in Oklahoma--and has not been carried out anywhere in the U.S. for more than three years. They also apparently believed that a sentence of more than 20 times the normal life-span would preclude any chance of parole for Callins. Their hopes notwithstanding, Callins in practice may very well be treated as a lifer and so could be paroled in 15 years.

Even so, Callins' public-defender attorney announced that he would appeal the "cruel and inhuman" sentence as "excessive." Such an appeal may give the reviewing court a chance to consider the wisdom of the longer-than-life syndrome. Conceivably the court could even reverse the guilty verdict on the ground that any jury imposing such a sentence has demonstrated an improper bias against the defendant.

The day after the Oklahoma City jury sent Callins up for 15 centuries, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (which does not include Oklahoma) bore out the jurors' doubts about the efficiency of the death penalty by declaring it unconstitutional in rape cases--at least where the victim's life was neither taken nor endangered. In such cases, the three-judge panel* ruled unanimously, a death sentence violates the "evolving standards of decency" that the Supreme Court has held are implicit in the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The court also noted that rape is a capital offense in fewer than one-third of the states, and elsewhere only in Malawi, Nationalist China, South Africa and South Viet Nam. The ruling is the broadest rejection of the death penalty ever handed down by a U.S. Court of Appeals.

*One of the three: Clement Haynsworth, President Nixon's unsuccessful 1969 "strict constructionist" nominee to the Supreme Court.

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