(New York Times, Wed. 18 November 1992)

[Mr. Watt Espy, a historian of executions, is a committed opponent of the death penalty who initially favored execution when he began research on it 22 years ago. Now he is devoting his life to uncovering all he can on every executions since colonial times. He has documented 18,482 since 1608.]

Headland, Ala., Nov. 11 - Cornelius Singleton, convicted of the rape and murder of of a nun when she went to pray's at another sister's grave in a deserted cemetery, is scheduled to be electrocuted by Alabama this month. Few state residents expect executive clemency, least of all Watt Espy, a historian of capital punishment who sees a record tide of executions waiting to sweep the nation in the next decade.

"Most awful,", says Mr. Espy, appalled at the very viciousness of the nun's murder, the kind of svagery that makes most Americans favor capital punishment to the point where 2,636 convicts await execution, more than at any time before.

By his accounting, this year's death-house toll will reach 28 victims with the state's dispatching of Mr. Singleton on November 20, the most in a single year since 1976, when the Supreme Court cleared the way for execution to resume.

This year's executions will fall short of the record 199 set in 1935, a desperate time economically and criminally, Mr. Espy notes. But this year signals an upswing that he estimates will be setting record annual tolls in excess of 300 executions by the turn of the century.

"QUIET BLOOD BATH"

"And the danger is that you can have a kind of quiet blood bath which the people won't even notice as executions become more common and less newsworthy," said Mr. Espy, a committed opponent of the deathe penalty who initially favored execution when he began research on it 22 years ago.

"If we executed one a day," he said, "it would take close to nine years to kill those now waiting on death row, and we're adding 200 to 300 a year beyond that."

Time-withered reams of crime magazines and court journals surround Mr. Espy, his computer and his dog here in a ramshackle house in the heart of this rural town, in southeastern Alabama, where, at 59, he now devotes his life to uncovering all he can on every execution since colonial times. So far he has documented 18,482 executions since 1608, when George Kendall was shot as a Spanish spy in the Virginia colony.

In contrast to past times of public controversy, Mr. Espy and other critics of executions now foresee an era of routine, footnote capital punishment of historic proportions in which the merits of the issue are less debated and in which retribution rather than deterrence is becoming the main social goal served. This shift is eased by a combination of the abolition of high-profile public execution more than 50 years ago and the application of modern technology in the form of lethal injection.

Of the 36 states that execute convicts, 22, plus the Federal Government, have adopted lethal injection in recent years as either the sole or optional means of death. While critics note the continuing problems with lethal injection in some states - 41 minutes of torturous probing for the veins of one doomed felon - other say that historically, humaneness has never been an overriding factor.

"Study after study now shows retribution is behind the push for capital punishment", said Kica Matos, the research director for the Capital Punishment Project of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

"What the American people want is some sort of a quick fix in the face of the rise in violence across the nation," Ms. Matos said.

The election of Bill Blinton presents conflicting signals, in her view. On the one hand he has promised judicial appointments rooted in individual quality rather than in conservative-agenda orthodoxy. But as Governor of Arkansas he oversaw executions without apology, including that of a lobotomized convicted murderer. Political specialists say this helped his campaign image as a firm centrist.

"Clinton's impact on the issue will be in the appointment of hundreds of Federal judges across time," Mr. Espy said. He contends that changes in the Supreme Court early in the Clinton Administration might not necessarily mean any immediate shift from an era of high-volume executions that Mr. Espy finds likely, particularly since recent Court rulings pruned the process of time-consuming death row appeals.

VICIOUSNESS AND DESPAIR

"Who was it said the Supreme Court reads newspapers?" Mr. Espy commented, emphasizing the power of the country's current despair at the viciousness of crime in a nation relatively young and steeped in frontier traditions like liberal gun possession.

The United States is one of only two major industrial nations - South Africa is the other - that has not abolished capital punishment. And it is the only one that permits the execution of convicts younger than 18 years of age, 16 being the limit in some jurisdictions.

Mr. Espy documents this history with daily care and without benefit of a research grant. A non-academic who used to sell encyclopedias and cementery plots, he prefers narrative detail to moralizing, letting not-so-old newspaper accounts ("Black Fiend Hanged/Jerked to Jesus") set the tone of the leering injustice that he contends remains the hallmark of capital punishment.

Mr. Espy feels that some day the nation will pause in the jagged routine of history and be ready for a full-scale debate on capital punishment. "I want to see it based on all the facts, not just emotion", he said. Accordingly, he gathers and savors human shadings above all, talking to the families of victims and perpetrators alike and wincing at the violence and sickness that he, for one, measures as largely unaffected by capital punishment.

"I happened to meet Cornelius Singleton's mother in Mobile," Mr. Espy said. "She's as fine a Christian lady as you could want to meet. And now she's become a victim of crime, just as much as that poor nun's family members and her fellow sisters."

RIPPLE IN NEW JERSEY

Prosecutors and defense lawyers say a constitutional amendment passed by New Jersey voters will probably not increase death-penalty trials. The Metro Serction, page B5.