Death penalty not foreseen soon here

Death penalty not foreseen soon here
Despite referendum passing Tuesday

By Anita Weier

Though 56 percent of Wisconsin voters approved an advisory referendum asking for establishment of the death penalty, there is no chance that capital punishment will become law anytime soon.

"I am a realist. There is no prospect," said state Sen. Al Lasee, R-DePere, the author of the referendum and a longtime supporter of capital punishment. "The Democrats took control of the Senate and Gov. Doyle got re-elected."

Gov. Jim Doyle opposes the death penalty and could veto any bill enacting the death penalty, and Lasee rammed the advisory referendum through the Legislature when both houses were controlled by Republicans and he was president of the Senate.

"But we laid the foundation for the fact that Wisconsin citizens are interested in supporting the death penalty," Lasee said. "It will not pass this session or maybe next, but at some time the Legislature will come around to the thinking of Wisconsin residents."

However, Stacy Harbaugh, community advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin's Madison office, said the ACLU and other members of a coalition that opposed the referendum would continue to fight a death penalty bill every step of the way.

"This was introduced very late, and we did not have a lot of time to organize. We knew it would be a hard fight from the beginning, due to the biased nature of the question, with the DNA clause," Harbaugh said.

"The question makes it seem like an open-and-shut case, but this is a much more complicated issue."

The death penalty would require a costly infrastructure for a state with no death rows, Harbaugh said, and appeals are very costly.

"Once people realize how unevenly the death penalty is applied in other states, they tend to change their minds," she said. "In states that have the death penalty, a similar crime can be committed and one person gets the death penalty and the other does not. It has to do with the race and class of the person who committed the crime and the race and class of the victim. It has to do with how much money the defendant has. And it is up to the prosecutor to decide whether to seek the death penalty, so it is different from state to state and county to county."

Lasee still plans to introduce a bill that would restore the death penalty in Wisconsin after 153 years, though the measure would differ from the phrasing in the advisory referendum.

That question on the ballot asked whether the death penalty should be enacted in Wisconsin for cases involving a person convicted of first-degree intentional homicide, if the conviction was supported by DNA evidence.

Lasee said his bill would spell out what types of murders and make sure that all evidence, including DNA, would be included in the finding of innocence or guilt.

"It would apply to the more vicious, gruesome, brutal murders, such as those involving kidnapping, rape, murder and mutilation," Lasee said. " That is the way it is done in 38 other states. Not every murderer ends up on death row."

E-mail: aweier@madison.com
Published: November 8, 2006

posted by Sachin @ 6:44 PM