Friday, January 16, 1998

Tucker's case shows need for faster appeals

The case of Karla Faye Tucker, the woman who faces lethal injection in Texas on Feb. 3, has created a nationwide discussion about whether capital punishment should apply equally to both genders. Gov. George W. Bush has been pressured by TV evangelist Pat Robertson and others to pardon Tucker, who has become a Christian while awaiting execution.

The state of Texas executed 37 men last year but hasn't executed a woman since the Civil War. The governor is a strong supporter of the death penalty, and much of the attention has focused on what he will do and how it might affect his chances in a possible run for the presidency in 2000.

Tucker herself put the gender question into perspective. "If you believe in it for one," she told a newspaper reporter, "you believe in it for everybody." That is, if you think the crime justifies execution and the trial was fair, there's no sound reason a woman should not pay this penalty the same as a man.

And Tucker's confessed crime was truly ghastly. High on drugs and accompanied by a boyfriend, she sank a pickax in the chest of an acquaintance 20 times and then helped murder a woman in bed with him. Every time she swung the ax, she later said, she felt sexual delight.

The problem is not so much whether Gov. Bush should issue a pardon. The problem is that Tucker committed this crime 14 years ago.

When the lapse between the criminal act and the ultimate penalty is as long as in Tucker's case, the sense of justice being done begins to evaporate. The crime is no longer fresh in memory, the guilty party may be a vastly different person, and the execution comes to seem a grisly formality only vaguely connected with the horror that provoked it.

A majority of Americans favor the death penalty, believing it to be not only fit retribution for certain crimes, but also a deterrent to the commission of others. For both purposes, such delays in our clogged justice system are unfair to relatives of victims, to society as a whole, even to the criminals themselves. American courts must focus on moving far more swiftly in considering death-row appeals. This high-profile Texas case underscores that demand.

Regarding Karla Faye Tucker, her supporters should realize that on his own, the governor of Texas can only postpone an execution for 30 days. Before he can even consider commuting a death penalty to life in prison, he must receive a recommendation to that effect from the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. In this instance, neither is likely to happen.