JACKSON - Do you support the imposition of the death penalty in Mississippi? The time has come to elect a few state Supreme Court and state Court of Appeals judges, but if you're interested in knowing how they'll rule in death penalty cases, you're out of luck.
The state Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits judicial candidates from taking public positions on specific judicial issues. That's how they'll dodge the questions, if you choose to let them.
What they won't tell you is that the Supreme Court crafts that code - and hence the judges appear more than comfortable in being able to be vague on the question of the death penalty.
Perhaps it's a good thing that judicial candidates can dodge questions about the death penalty - because the truth is that the bottleneck on the death penalty in this state is at the appeals court level.
There are some myths about death row in Mississippi - not the least of which is that it's a place where inmates go to await execution. It's not.
It's simply a place where inmates go to wait - because the death penalty doesn't work in Mississippi. Why? Ask the state Supreme Court? Oops, I'm sorry, they wish they could answer, but they can't.
Like the inmates, the families of their victims wait as well - for closure or justice or both - only to be numbed by the unending inertia of it all.
Nationwide, death row inmates serve an average of 11.4 years before their sentences are carried out. Here, the wait is longer.
In Mississippi, there hasn't been an execution since June 21, 1989. Let's put things in perspective, shall we?
The U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics data indicates that since 1973, Mississippi has sentenced 165 inmates to death. Four have been executed. Three died. Ninety-four had their conviction or sentence overturned on appeal. Three were transferred. Sixty-six remain on Mississippi's death row.
During that same period, 239 inmates were executed in Texas, 81 in Virginia, 50 in Florida, 46 in Missouri, 30 in Oklahoma, 26 in Louisiana, 25 in South Carolina, 23 each in Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia, 22 in Arizona and 16 in North Carolina.
There were 66 executions nationwide in 2001. Eighty-one death row inmates were executed in 2000. In 2000, Alabama executed four inmates - the same number that Mississippi has executed since 1973.
When the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 1990s overturned a large number of Mississippi death penalty convictions on the grounds that Mississippi jurors were too ignorant to understand the meaning of the "heinous, atrocious and cruel" jury instruction, the state Supreme Court essentially stopped pushing death penalty cases through the system.
The recent addition of a state-sponsored Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel to review the state's death penalty cases has also slowed the process, but the fact remains that Mississippi has failed to make the death penalty a factor in the state's judicial system in more than a decade while other state's methodically enforce the death penalty.
The result? The national murder rate is 6.8 percent. Mississippi's murder rate is 11.4 percent. In Texas - the so-called "capital of capital punishment" - the murder rate is 6.8 percent.
As voters, Mississippians have a reasonably good idea about Presiding Justice Chuck McRae's views on the crime of driving under the influence based on the public record. Be nice to hear him speak to his views on the death penalty as well.
The death penalty isn't working in Mississippi. Most Mississippians clearly favor the death penalty in capital cases. Voters should hold judicial candidates accountable for their views on capital punishment and vote accordingly.
