Va. killer set to be 1,000th executed

List is at 997 since Gilmore in 1977

"Let's do it."

With those last words, convicted killer Gary Gilmore ushered in the modern era of capital punishment in the United States, an age of busy death chambers that will likely see its 1,000th execution in the coming days.

In 1977, after a 10-year moratorium, Gilmore became the first person to be executed after a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision that validated state laws to reform the capital punishment system. Since then, 997 prisoners have been executed; and next week, the 998th, 999th and 1,000th are scheduled to die.

Robin Lovitt, 41, will likely be the one to earn that macabre distinction Wednesday. He was convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a 1998 pool hall robbery in Virginia.

Ahead of Lovitt on death row are Eric Nance, scheduled to be executed Monday in Arkansas, and John Hicks, scheduled to be executed Tuesday in Ohio. Both appear likely to proceed.

Gilmore was executed before a Utah firing squad after a record of petty crime, the killing of a motel manager and suicide attempts in prison. His life was the basis for Norman Mailer's book "The Executioner's Song" and a TV miniseries.

Though Gilmore's case was well-known, most people today probably could not name even one of the more than 3,400 prisoners -- including 118 foreign nationals -- on death row in the United States. In the last 28 years, the nation has executed on average one person every 10 days.

Debate shifts focus

The focus of the debate on capital punishment was once whether it deterred crime. Today, the argument is more on whether the government can be trusted not to execute an innocent person.

Thomas Hill, an attorney for a death row inmate in Ohio who recently won a second stay, thinks the answer is obvious.

"We have a criminal system that makes mistakes," Hill said. "If you accept that proposition, that means you have to be prepared for the inevitability that some are sentenced to death for crimes they didn't commit."

But advocates of the death penalty argue that its opponents are elitist liberals who are ignoring the real victims.

"Since 1999, we've had 100,000 innocent people murdered in the U.S., but nobody is planning on commemorating all those people killed," said Michael Paranzino, president of Throw Away the Key, which supports the death penalty.

Race is also a key question in the debate. Since 1976, 58 percent of those executed in the United States have been white; 34 percent have been black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But non-Latino whites make up 75 percent of the U.S. population, and non-Latino blacks constitute a little more than 12 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Some supporters say ending the death penalty would be harmful to poor minorities, who are disproportionately murder victims.

"Increasingly violent crime is primarily for the working class folks, poor people and people of color," Paranzino said.

Opponents of capital punishment also point to the unfair role of class and race in death penalty cases. Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, said: "There is tremendous arbitrariness to the death penalty. ... The race of the victims has a lot to do with who winds up getting executed." The Innocence Project is a legal clinic that seeks to exonerate inmates through DNA testing.

Death sentences nationwide have dropped by 50 percent since the late 1990s, with executions carried out down by 40 percent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Twelve states do not have the death penalty, and at least two, Illinois and New Jersey, have formal moratoriums on capital punishment.