Death row curious place to show courage

By BOB GREENE

SALT LAKE CITY - Roberto Arguelles wants to see the bullets coming at him.

Big deal. So he gets to think of himself as a little hero as he dies. Arguelles, 35, has been sentenced to death for kidnapping, sexually abusing and murdering three girls and a woman. He pleaded guilty to four counts of capital murder.

He got to choose the manner in which he will be executed (a courtesy he did not extend to his victims); he selected death by firing squad, but said he would prefer not to wear the black hood that condemned prisoners usually are given. His attorney told the judge, "He wants to see it coming."

The judge granted Arguelles' wish; he will be shot without wearing the hood. His courage in doing this can legitimately be questioned; evidently he is brave enough to showboat with his shoot-me-with-my-eyes-open posturing, but cowardly enough to continue to torment the families of his victims by refusing to divulge the details of his crimes - including the strangulations of a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl and their burial at a pig farm. Because Arguelles won't talk, the families will never know what really happened to their loved ones.

So, if an automatic appeal of Arguelles' sentence is not decided in his favor, he will be killed by a firing squad as early as next summer. Debates over the rightness or wrongness of the death penalty will flare up on the eve of the execution - although not as loudly or fervently as those debates did 20 years ago, here in Utah, where, after a long hiatus, executions in the United States were resumed with the killing of murderer Gary Gilmore.

Those of us who were at the prison at Point of the Mountain that morning were present to cover a story that was, briefly, the biggest in the world. State-sanctioned executions had not occurred in the U.S. for 10 years before the 1977 execution of Gilmore; like Arguelles, Gilmore was a showoff ("Let's do it," he said before he was led to the firing squad); like Arguelles, Gilmore was treated considerably more civilly by the society that punished him than he treated the people whom he, by his own choice, executed.

Today there is very little attention paid to the execution of murderers; today the debate about the death penalty - while just as theologically and philosophically important as it was in 1977 - is given much less public attention. It's old news now; the government executes killers. If you think such an act is wrong, you still think it's wrong, if you think it's right, you still think it's right - but it's old news.

What can be sobering - and depressing - is to look at certain numbers that are a part of all this. When executions were resumed with the firing-squad death of Gilmore, the anti-death-penalty groups argued that executions would become so common as to cheapen the concept of human life, and would not deter crime; the pro-death-penalty groups argued that the strongest tribute to the sanctity of human life is the severest possible punishment for criminals who elect to take a life.

Since the execution of Gilmore - since 1977 - there have been, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, 397 executions. This varies by an execution or two from the number provided by other sources - executions have, as predicted, become so common it's difficult to come up with a precise total.

And - also since 1977 - there have been, according to the U.S. government, 427,510 murder/homicides in this country. That doesn't even include the murder/homicides in 1996 and so far in 1997, which haven't been added to the official totals. You can make the case that the half-million murders done by individuals since 1977 should count as executions the same way that the 397 killings done as punishment by state governments are counted. When and if Roberto Arguelles is executed by the firing squad, it will be no more or less an execution than what he did to those two girls he buried at the pig farm.

The discussion goes on over what constitutes the cheapening of human life. Meanwhile, whether or not Arguelles is eventually executed, he has already received at least one additional courtesy he apparently did not extend to his victims. At the end of his death-penalty hearing, he thanked the judge for treating him with dignity. Then the two men shook hands.

Chicago Tribune