On death row

Interview, Jan, 1996 by Tim Robbins

TR: Do you try to talk about God, about religion? What message, if any, are you taking to the inmates?

SHP: The basic message is that when somebody gets into a car and drives to see you, it says only one thing: You count. That someone cares means you have dignity and worth as a person, and that no matter what you have done, if you're guilty or innocent, you have worth as a human being.

TR: I've been thinking, recently, about the use of the word human. There's an Incredible capacity for love and forgiveness, but there is also a drive for revenge and violence. When I was starting to work on this film, I had to come to an understanding with my own capacity for violence. If anyone ever messed with my family, I could kill them, and it is important to accept that potential before you start to form any opinions on this issue. Since I've done this project, I'm a lot less likely to pass judgment on someone who has the desire for vengeance.

SHP: I feel the same way. Who wouldn't feel a desire for revenge if one of their loved ones were killed?

TR: Many people argue that the death penalty Is a significant deterrent [to crime]. Why do you think It is not?

SHP: Just look at the statistics. The states that have the death penalty have roughly double the homicide rate of states that don't. Look at Canada, where after abolishing the death penalty in 1976, the murder rate began to go down. The key reason that the death penalty is not a deterrent is that the people doing the thinking and the people doing the murdering are two separate groups. when people get involved in violence, they do not sit down beforehand to consider the consequences. As the warden at Angola [State Penitentiary, in Louisiana] told me, "Sister, nobody here even thought they'd get caught." Generally, when people are on a skid in their life, or are in chaos, they do not think of the long-term consequences of their actions. This is borne out by the fact that more and more violent crimes are being committed by the very young, who tend not to think about the effects of what they do. That's why the death penalty is not, and cannot be, a deterrent. In the summer of '87, we executed eight people in eight-and-a-half weeks in Louisiana, and the murder rate in New Orleans went up.

TR: In your book you describe the death penalty as a lottery, saying that of the thousands of homicides each year, only 1 or 2 percent of the criminals convicted of murder actually get death sentences, and then only a fraction of these are executed. It seems, therefore, that in reality the punishment does not necessarily represent the nature of the crime. Does this contradict our notion that only the most evil and unrepentant criminals are condemned to die?

SHP: The rhetoric of the death penalty is that it will be reserved for the most heinous crimes, so we cast a net to get the Ted Bundys and the John Wayne Gacy, Jrs. and so on. True, some of the people who are drawn up into that net have committed terrible crimes on more than one person, but many of the approximately 3,000 inmates on death row right now are from poor backgrounds. Roughly 85 percent of the murderers are there because their victims were white. Many of them have a very limited mental capacity. Some were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And some of them are innocent. So, while superficially, any country that has the death penalty may say that it is reserved for only the worst criminals, a lot depends on what is considered politically the "worst" crime, and that begins with the status of the victim. It's funny that when some people are killed in our society, nobody seems to notice. Not only does the state not ask for the death penalty, it hardly prosecutes the case at all.