It is hard for progressives to get excited about John Kerry. Supports the War in Iraq and actually wants to send more troops in, voted for the Patriot Act, voted for NAFTA and on and on. Yet there is one issue where Kerry stands in stark contrast to his opponent, George Bush: the death penalty.

Since one of his arguments against the death penalty in the past has been that he doesn’t think it can be fairly administered and mistake-free, you have to wonder why he thinks that in the case of alleged foreign terrorists, those problems wouldn’t exist. Indeed, given the fevered state of the nation where terrorism and Islam is concerned, it’s likely that any failures in the quality of justice of the American legal system would be most in evidence in a trial of a foreign terrorist suspect. Just imagine trying to get a fair and impartial jury to consider the fate of Osama Bin Laden, or anyone connected with the 9/11 attacks. (It’s also worth pondering just what is meant by the terms “foreign” and “terrorist.” The current administration and Attorney General John Ashcroft have been applying the term terrorist rather broadly, such that it might well be applied to people who exercise their right to protest at military bases or presidential appearances. And does Kerry include among “foreign,” those people who are in the U.S. on green cards?)

A second troubling thing is that Kerry voted for the notorious 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Recall that this dreadful anti-democratic piece of legislation, sponsored by Sen. Bob Dole, and supported and signed into law by President Clinton, was drawn up in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, at a time when everyone was being told (incorrectly as we learned) that that bloody act of terror was probably the work of Arab terrorists. Kerry, ever a politician to go with the popular flow, went along with this bill, which besides adding terrorism to the list of crimes that qualified for the federal death penalty (five years before Kerry actually said he favored death for foreign terrorists), also made it much more difficult for anyone sentenced to death to appeal their sentences. For example, it limited such condemned prisoners to one habeas corpus appeal.

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