By D. Brian Burghart

With the anticipated execution of Reno U-Haul killer Alvaro Calambro, the issue of the death penalty is again a headline-grabbing topic of discussion.

Calambro's execution has been delayed until sometime after Aug. 10, when state and federal courts will rule on his mental competency.

His fate is being played out on TV and in newspapers, but not in the political arena.

That might seem strange, since this is a political year.

In Nevada and across the country, an anti-capital punishment stance is—pun intended—a kiss of death for candidates. As Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis learned in 1988, the suggestion that a candidate could be soft on criminals is political suicide.

In that year, Dukakis was asked during a debate by panelist Bernard Shaw whether he would remain opposed to the death penalty even if Dukakis' wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered.

Dukakis' wishy-washy answer—he didn't demonstrate outrage or a desire for revenge—contributed to his losing to George Bush.

A decade later, one of the most important political issues of our time never even comes up.

Until now.

State Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas and a candidate for governor, is the only serious statewide candidate in recent memory to oppose the death penalty.

The leading Republican gubernatorial contender Kenny Guinn supports the death penalty. Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones, the leading Democratic challenger, did not return repeated calls for comment.

Even so, Neal is not expecting his stance to become an issue. With public support for the death penalty on the rise, Neal thinks it will be a long time before it becomes a political football again.

“All of the laws seem to be in place at the moment [in Nevada] for the death penalty, and nobody is attempting to repeal it,” State Senator Joe Neal says.

“All of the laws seem to be in place at the moment [in Nevada] for the death penalty, and nobody is attempting to repeal it,” he says. “I would not attempt to change those laws. I don't think there would be an interest in the state Legislature to change them.”

In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down capital punishment laws nationwide, but four years later the court reinstated the death penalty. The Nevada Legislature adopted a new death-penalty statute in 1977. Currently, 38 states have the death penalty.

Neal says no Nevada politician is eager to carry the anti-death-penalty banner anymore.

“No one has had an appetite to go back and fight those battles,” Neal says. “In the early '70s, there was a movement across the country to discontinue the use of the death penalty. I was very much a part of the group that was trying to accomplish that.”

With that kind of record, Neal could be hurt worse politically by flip-flopping rather than by simply saying that during the years since he joined the state senate in 1972, he has voted against capital punishment in every instance except for provisions dealing with hate crimes.

“You can be tough on crime without having the death penalty,” Neal says. “I think our legislators over the years have demonstrated that they're very tough on crime in terms of increasing the penalty for certain crimes. For example, if you attack an older person, you get double the punishment.”

One candidate who supports the death penalty is Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa, who is seeking re-election.

“The reality is most people who run for this job, and most people in the state of Nevada, are actually pro death penalty,” Del Papa says. “I've never heard of anyone running for either the attorney general or most other positions in this state who have not been supportive of the death penalty. Nevada is a death penalty state. That is the law in the state of Nevada. Anyone who assumes office in this state takes an oath to uphold the laws of the state of Nevada.”

Del Papa, a Democrat, will likely face Republican Scott Scherer in the Nov. 1 general election. Scherer, a gaming attorney and former assemblyman, is also a death penalty supporter. He says Nevada needs to streamline the capital punishment process to come into line with the new federal appeals system.

Neal says most candidates jump on the tough-on-crime bandwagon hoping that support of the death penalty will help propel them into office.

“Right now, you've got [gubernatorial candidate] Kenny Guinn who's come out and said that he favors the death penalty,” Neal says. “I look at that like 'the death penalty is not an issue in this state, so why would he come out and say that he favored it?' I don't know whether it would have been an issue in this campaign unless he had anticipated that I was going to be his opponent, and I have been in opposition to it.”

On Feb. 19, 1878, J. W. Rover was hanged for the murder of his business partner, I. N. Sharp. He was innocent.

Neal says the death penalty doesn't stop crime and could lead to the wrong person being executed.

“I don't see how you could execute one innocent person and say that law is a success,” he says.

In Nevada, at least one apparently innocent man has been executed.

On Feb. 19, 1878, J. W. Rover was hanged for the murder of his business partner, I. N. Sharp. His other business partner and accuser, F. J. McWorthy, confessed to the killing on his death bed. Nevada State Archivist Guy Rocha says this is the only documented example of an innocent person receiving capital punishment in the state's history.

However, in 1996, Roberto Miranda was released after spending 14 years on Nevada's death row for the 1981 murder of Manuel Rodriguez Torres. Miranda was released because his public defender did not produce the witnesses who could have cleared him in his first trial. The lawyer who won his release, Laura FitzSimmons, said she has lost touch with him.

The Politics Of Death
Richard Siegel, a UNR political science professor and vice president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, agrees that those seeking public office consider it bad politics to oppose the death penalty.

“Two of the last politicians who came out publicly against the death penalty were Dukakis and [New York Gov. Mario] Cuomo, and they lost their last elections while advocating against the death penalty,” he says. “Those were very high-profile campaigns, and other candidates took their cue.”

That cue also hinges on poll numbers that show public opinion is running about 75-80 percent in favor of the death penalty. That's up from about 50 percent 30 years ago, Siegel says.

He says politicians will sell their souls to garner votes.

“I think there are quite a few politicians who lie about the death penalty—especially on the liberal side of the issue, because even by the public opinion polls about a quarter of the population is against the death penalty,” he says.

Based on percentages alone, says Seigel, there should be more anti-death penalty politicians.

“I think many politicians are privately opposed to the death penalty, but they don't say so,” he says. “That whole thing bothers me because I think that's a big thing to lie about. I think people like Bill and Hillary Clinton are lying about the death penalty. I'm always very suspicious of politicians who are liberal on almost every issue, but say they support the death penalty.”

Life or death situations should not be politicized, Siegel says.

“You may fudge on an economic issue because [an unpopular position] is political suicide, but to vote to kill people because it facilitates your election is not just politics, it's immoral.”

Siegel says anti-death-penalty activists these days are fighting for specific issues like whether people who committed crimes before becoming an adult— or people with emotional or mental problems—should be killed by the state.

This year, for example, Nebraska became the 12th state to ban the execution of defendants with mental retardation. Nevada does not have such a law, says Legislative Counsel Bureau Director Lorne Malkiewich.

That could be important in the Calambro case. His IQ has been measured at 71. This is one point above what is considered mentally retarded.

“Calambro's case is problematic from the anti-death penalty point of view, because he's apparently had some mental problems for a good part of his life,” Siegel says.

Calambro was sentenced to death for his part in the brutal murder of Peggy Crawford and Keith Cristopher in 1994 at the U-Haul store at 3411 S. Virginia St. His scheduled June 13 execution was postponed by the Nevada Supreme Court while justices ordered a competency hearing to determine if he is insane as put forth by his mother, Lydia Calambro, in an appeal. Alvaro Calambro has not sought appeals of his death sentence on his own behalf. As mentioned, his future will be decided after Aug. 10, when federal and state judges rule on various issues regarding his mental competence.

When you look at the polling results, 75 percent plus would say they support the death penalty in those cases where the crime is so heinous as to merit it.

If Calambro is to die by lethal injection for his part in the murders, he will be the seventh person executed since Nevada reinstituted the death penalty in 1977, Rocha says. The first since then, Jesse Bishop, was killed by gas, while the rest were executed by lethal injection.

According to Siegel, even one execution is too many.

“I don't think that we have the right to execute people as a society,” he says. “Research indicates that there rarely is a death penalty called for by the prosecutor when the victim is not white. The other most basic discrimination is that women almost never get the death penalty. Also people who are not poor [who] can afford their own attorney hardly ever get the death penalty. We also have evidence that quite a number of people, dozens and dozens of people, up to 100 people in this century, have been found after the fact to been innocent of the crimes that they were executed for.”

Courage Of Their Convictions
Nationwide, executions reached a 40-year peak last year when 74 executions were carried out in the U.S. Half—or 37—were in Texas. The Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C., anti-death penalty group, attributes part of this increase to a faster appeals process.

The number of executions in 1997 surpassed the highest figure for any year since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 18 more than in 1995, the previous record year. The last time more people were executed in a single year in the United States was 1955, when 76 people were executed.

The 38 executions thus far this year have brought the overall total since the reinstatement of capital punishment to 470. As of April 1, 1998, the national death row population was 3,387.

In Nevada, there are 86 people on death row, according to the Nevada Department of Prisons. Only one is a woman. She is Priscilla Ford, who was convicted of killing seven pedestrians with her car in downtown Reno on Thanksgiving Day in 1980. Forty-three of Nevada's death-row inmates are white, 35 are black, one is Cuban, six are Hispanic and one is Asian. The majority, 46, have been there since before 1991.

“According to the statistics that I have,” Del Papa says, “since our statute was reenacted in 1977, of the six inmates who have been executed, five were volunteers,” which means they did not pursue the appeals process.

Del Papa says the biggest problem with capital punishment in Nevada is the time it takes to execute condemned prisoners. She says the appeals process needs to be reformed.

“We in this office have fought for habeas corpus reform over the years—putting a time limit on which of these appeals can be filed and limiting the number of appeals that can be filed,” she says. “When you look at Nevada historically, one of the things that has happened is that various inmates have gone up and down the appellate ladder a number of times.”

She says legislative reform will speed up executions, lowering the average death penalty appeal process from 15-20 years to 3-5 years.

Del Papa says that politicians who don't believe in the death penalty should have the courage of their convictions and say so.

“I think politicians should tell the truth,” she says. “The reality is most of the public in Nevada, when you look at the polling results—my guess is that 75 percent plus—would say they support the death penalty in those cases where the crime is so heinous as to merit it.”

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