Opinion, by Mario Cuomo

Like other Americans, millions of New Yorkers decry the bizarre violence, rampant drug addiction, broken families and other cultural corrosion that make today´s America so uncomfortable with itself. Recent advances like the dramatic drop in the crime rate, especially in New York City, offer some hope. But the truth is, we´re still struggling to master these profound societal problems. Ironically, some of the steps our politicians are taking to correct them actually make the problems worse - even as they win those politicians a lot of votes. The death penalty is one such perverse strategy. Virtually the entire Western world has rejected it as an act of unacceptable official brutality that only invites more brutality. Even Israel - a nation that knows perhaps better than any other the terrible price a people can pay for the violent tactics of others - has abandoned the death penalty in nearly all cases because it would only make things worse. Individually and cumulatively, the arguments against the death penalty are so powerful that pro-death politicians can only pretend they don´t exist. In the new enthusiasm for capital punishment, no one even tries to refute the substance of the case: The fact that capital punishment has killed innocent people (in this century, eight in New York State alone) and will inevitably kill innocents in the future; the fact that a death sentence is more expensive for the state but no more effective than (and in a sense not even as "tough" as) life in prison without parole; the fact that - as two American Bar Association panels recently declared the death penalty is applied so erratically as to be inherently unfair, demonstrably skewed by the race and class of both the killers and their victims; the fact that state endorsement of capital punishment simply teaches violence as an answer to violence. The strength of the case against capital punishment is nowhere better evidenced than in the failed attempt to defend it on the grounds of deterrence. It is argued that the death penalty instituted in New York after my departure as Governor was followed by a reduction in homicides. Murders in New York City dropped by more than a third in the two years before the re-imposition of the death penalty. The truth is, in New York and across the country, violent crime, including murder, is dropping - but it also was dropping steadily in virtually every category for more than four years before New York brought back the prospect of the death penalty: And it continues to be true that Texas, the undisputed capital of capital punishment with more than a dozen executions every year, has one of the highest murder rates anywhere. Support for the death penalty can conceivably win a politician public office. Some people say it was the winning ticket for Gov. Pataki. That may be. But it doesn´t change the truth - that the death penalty is the state sponsored stamp of approval for a primitive brand of vengeance that demeans us as a people and drags us down to the very level of the killers we kill.