Experts question gun bill's impact
Friday, April 08, 2005
CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer
A bill moving through the Alabama Senate to expand the death penalty to murders committed with federally banned assault weapons would do little or nothing, authorities say, because those guns are not illegal anymore.
Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, won a 9-2 vote Wednesday from the Senate Judiciary Committee for his proposed rewrite of the state death penalty statute. Smitherman said his bill was inspired by discussions with Birmingham police, who lost three officers to shots from an SKS rifle last summer.
But the SKS is legal, as are most of the guns listed on Smitherman's original bill.
He rewrote it to allow the death penalty for murders committed with weapons that are federally banned. Smitherman said he believed this change would cover murders with fully automatic weapons.
But the ATF says he's mistaken.
"There are no federally banned guns, either," said Carl Bengtson, supervisory special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives. "They need to do some more tweaking."
A federal law that had banned assault weapons was allowed to expire last year. Owners of automatic weapons, sometimes called machine guns, face specific tax and registration laws. But as long as a buyer pays $200, fills out a registration application and passes a background check, he or she can legally own an automatic, Bengtson said.
Few such guns are used in homicides, though.
"We haven't had a real big problem with machine guns being used since the gangster era," Bengston said, referring to the 1920s gangster, not the 1990s gangsta'.
Few actually used:
A Florida State University study of guns used in crimes found that less than 1 percent of murders, even in high-crime areas such as Miami and Chicago, were committed with fully automatic weapons.
Smitherman said his interest in the issue stems from conversations with police. Although the triple slaying occurred with a legal weapon, and killing a police officer already is a death-penalty crime, he and officers wanted to toughen the death penalty laws beyond that occurrence.
"Once I started discussing it with them, they were excited that something was being done about those automatic weapons, especially the illegal ones," said Smitherman. "There were no discussions about what's banned and what's not. That didn't come into play. The conversations I had with them wasn't that sophisticated."
His original bill named numerous semi-automatic, military-style rifles, most of which are cheap, flashy guns commonly known as "assault weapons." A 1994 federal law banned assault weapons. But it was allowed to sunset last year. The Bush Administration did not renew the ban, legalizing guns such as AK-47s and AR-15s.
Compromise:
The substitute bill - the current version - was the result of a compromise. Smitherman, who is a lawyer, said he was satisfied with the original bill, which named weapons that are legal and don't have to be registered.
"In my move to get it passed, it was a compromise with the NRA and other members of the Legislature ... concerned about the limitations placed on their ability to use a weapon," he said. He said he believes the current version will cover crimes with certain guns, such as guns that are illegal to import or semiautomatics that have been altered to be fully automatic.
Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm that represents poor people on Death Row, says Alabama does not need a broader death penalty law; it already sentences more people per capita to death than any other state.
Alabama prosecutors can seek the death penalty for someone convicted of intentional murder with any one of 18 aggravating factors, such as murder of a police officer or a child under 14.
"There are nearly 300 people awaiting capital trials," Stevenson said. "Judges can't find lawyers to assign to these cases; the cost of these cases is creating a fiscal crisis and expanding the statute will do absolutely nothing to improve public safety. This is the kind of ill-advised crime policy-making that has created many of the problems the state is struggling to recover from."
