NATIONAL SENTIMENT FAVORS EXECUTIONS

FEAR OF CRIME KEY FACTOR, OFFICIALS SAY

Instead, it inaugurated a slow, uneven but inexorable rise in executions that only now is beginning to soar.

Just five executions occurred in the six years following Gilmore's. Five more offenders were put to death in 1983 alone, and 21 in 1994. There were 38 executions in 1993. This year, the count reached 30 before the end of June.

And the backlog is enormous.

Death rows across the country hold about 3,000 condemned prisoners, the most ever. And it's becoming easier to impose a death sentence and to carry it out.

Heated debate rages over the morality and efficacy of capital punishment. But experts on both sides of the issue agree about where we're headed and how we got here.

"There clearly are going to be more executions," said capital-punishment

opponent Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a premier source of information on the subject. "It does seem there is a mood in the country in favor of applying the death penalty and applying it more quickly and with less (appellate) review."

"The public attitude has evolved toward stronger support" for execution, said Paul McNulty, majority counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, who is helping revise federal capital-punishment statutes.

The reason, according to both: fear of violent crime.

Capital punishment is an old American institution. Since Daniel Frank was put to death for theft in the colony of Virginia in 1622, an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 have been executed in the United States, according to Hugo Bedau, an authority on the subject.

In modern times, frequency of executions peaked in the 1930s - a period of high violent crime and economic depression - with 199 in 1935 and 190 in 1938. The number dropped into the low 100s throughout the '40s, into double digits through most of the '50s and early '60s, and halted after 1967.

Experts attribute the decline to prosperity, a dropping crime rate, an ascendant civil rights movement, growing willingness of federal courts to overturn state courts' actions and successful courtroom challenges to capital punishment by the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. During the '60s, some polls found more Americans opposing than supporting the death penalty.

In 1972 - with lower courts having put executions on hold in anticipation of Supreme Court action - the high court effectively nullified existing death-penalty statutes. In 1976, the justices permitted executions to resume - provided the laws offered clear guidance for when the sentence could be imposed, yet allowed judges and juries to consider mitigating circumstances.

While many states rushed to enact conforming laws, lengthy appeals prevented most sentences from being carried out. Four of the first five post-1976 executions - including Gilmore's - were of prisoners who declined to appeal. An eight-year gap between sentencing and execution was average for the 287 death sentences carried out since 1977.

A flood of executions now looms because many prisoners are running out of even that long appeal time, and courts and legislatures have been making executions easier to conduct. Because violent crimes tend to be handled by state rather than federal courts, implementation of the death penalty varies widely.

Twelve states do not impose capital punishment, and they are found primarily in New England and the upper Midwest. Although there are federal civilian and military death penalties, the last was carried out in 1963.

While 38 states have adopted death penalties, 12 of them have not conducted an execution in the last two decades and six have carried out just one. Only eight states have conducted 10 or more executions since 1976, seven of them in the South. The South is responsible for 85 percent of the post-1976 executions. Texas alone had executed 97 as of late last month, 12 this year.

Experts don't anticipate a significant increase in the number of states adopting capital punishment, or in the variety of crimes subject to it. They do expect legislatures and courts to continue recent trends of lowering barriers to execution, by streamlining appeals and limiting prisoners' access to federal review of state court decisions.

Long delays between crime and punishment have fueled "an element of frustration and discouragement on the part of the public," McNulty said. Speeding the process will address the public's desire for "the government to be decisive and effective in dealing with crime," he added.

For Dieter, however, "there's a danger that not only will executions occur more quickly, but they could occur in error."