Columnist Erin Neff: Taxes taking attention from death penalty reform

Erin Neff

Friday, Jan. 31, 2003 | 5:12 a.m.

It's said that reform takes several legislative sessions to enact -- one or two to float an idea, another to build consensus and finally one for action.

Reformers had a lot of hope for the 2003 Legislature, set to begin tomorrow in Carson City. They wanted to reduce Nevada's blood alcohol content for drivers, give homeowners the right to repair construction defects and limit the use of the death penalty to the worst of the worst.

But just as the federal government focuses squarely on Iraq, Nevada is focused squarely on taxes.

And while 1,200 bills will keep the 63 lawmakers busy for 120 days, reformers think this is a session they'll have to write off as another in the long line of those that built consensus.

The coming $706 million deficit has shifted momentum away from social reform and into an anti-tax frenzy. Efforts to reform the death penalty, which gained steam between sessions with a series of hearings, will probably be shelved in Nevada behind the 1,200-page tome on taxes.

"It's just such a bad budget year," says Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, a Democrat from Reno who chaired an interim committee studying problems with Nevada's death penalty. "I just don't think it's going to happen."

But consensus is still growing outside of Nevada to limit capital punishment.

The U.S. Supreme Court this summer declared that executing mentally retarded inmates constituted cruel and unusual punishment, and was thus, unconstitutional.

More recently an Illinois Republican, outgoing Gov. George Ryan, shut down his state's death row as his last public act. All 167 inmates are now sentenced to life without parole.

A majority of Americans -- about 70 percent -- support capital punishment. But the Supreme Court recognized that support is dwindling for some executions.

In fact, the high court reversed its 1989 ruling, because of a national trend away from the death penalty in some cases. Since the original 1989 ruling, 16 new states banned the execution of the mentally ill.

"It is not so much the number of these states that is significant, but the constant direction of the charge," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

Ryan's actions take the court's ruling a step further. So rife with injustice was Illinois' capital system that Ryan first halted executions to study the problems, and then when learning the answers, he commuted all death sentences.

Nevada hasn't done that kind of study. No money. Not enough public interest, and no proof that we've executed the innocent here.

Besides, Nevada has killed just nine people since the death penalty was reinstated in the mid-1970s. Texas has already offed three this year, perhaps vying for the record 98 the state killed in 1999.

But don't let our small number of executed fool you. Nevada's death row population -- now at 85 -- is the highest per capita in the nation. We will, under current law, execute those with IQs under 70 and those who were 16 when they committed the crime.

Nevada also has cases in which juries didn't put someone on death row -- judges did.

The death penalty should be for the worst of the worst. Yet the system continues to prove otherwise. In Nevada you can get the death penalty if you're 16, if you're mentally retarded and if the jury just can't decide.

But Nevada officials continue to trivialize serious social reform for the quick result. Instead of easing the problems in capital cases, Nevada is worried about building a wheelchair ramp so the condemned's relatives can watch the execution.

It'll cost a requested $236,893 to refurbish Nevada's death chamber to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. But that doesn't include the cost to society of executing the wrong person.