A CAPITAL OFFENSE

SINCE HER police-sergeant father was slain two years ago, Amber Liczbinski has graduated from high school and has been accepted into college.

Although life goes on, Amber last week - in front of the Philadelphia jury that could hand death sentences to the two men convicted of the May 3, 2008, murder of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, 39 - spoke of wanting closure.

"I know that any punishment they receive won't bring my dad back, but I know that by getting the worst punishment possible it may bring me closure," said Amber, 18.

Many a grieving relative has shared such sentiments with Pennsylvania jurors since the state resumed capital punishment in 1978, but few have obtained that closure.

That's because no matter how shocking the murder, how heartless the murderer or how innocent the victim, the state's death row appears to have become a safe zone for those sent there.

Although 220 inmates live under death sentences, only three - after dropping all appeals - have been executed since 1978. Double-murderer Gary Heidnik was the last of them, in 1999.

Meanwhile, a majority of the 35 states that have the death penalty have executed a dozen or more convicts since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment. Texas has the most, with 462 executions; next is Virginia, with 107; then come Oklahoma, 92; Florida, 69; and Missouri, 67, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.

Death-penalty opponents salute the appeals process that keeps the condemned alive for decades, but grieving relatives view appeals as roadblocks to that elusive closure.

Mary Piccone, 71, still speaks of her youngest of five children, Nicolette "Nicky" Caserta, in the present tense. "She'll be 42 next month [Sept. 12]," Piccone said during a phone interview Friday.

Another pain sears Piccone, and causes her voice to grow bitter.

It's that Henry Fahy, the Kensington man who was sentenced to death for raping and murdering 12-year-old Nicky, is still very much alive on Pennsylvania's death row.

"I think it's all a big joke," said Piccone. "I don't know why they give the death penalty, because they don't use it. He doesn't deserve to live, but he gets appeal after appeal, and the victim is just gone. If they would use the death penalty, there would be less crime. There would be something the prisoners would be afraid of; but there is no fear now."

The circumstances of Nicky's rape and murder were so brutal that veteran homicide Det. Michael Chitwood - now police chief in Upper Darby - broke down on the witness stand while reading Fahy's confession statement in January 1983.

A walk down death row will reveal many similarly sad and sickening stories. Among them:

* After being sentenced to death in 1995 for raping and murdering his girlfriend's 3-year-old son at a North Philadelphia housing project, Kenneth Brown smiled and proclaimed that he didn't care. We all have to die, he said.

Brown, 46, remains alive.

* In 1980, James Jones used electric wire to tie Diane Williams, 21, and her sister, Karen, 18, to the cellar-stairs banister at his home on Montgomery Avenue near 25th Street. He gagged the women, doused them with gasoline then set them ablaze.

Twenty-nine years later, Jones, 67, is still waiting to be executed.

* When Leslie Beasley was sentenced to die for the 1980 murder of Police Officer Ernest Davis, 38, he was the only person on the state's death row for killing a city cop. Thirty years later, seven Philadelphia cop-killers are on death row.

As early as this week, that number could grow by two if the Common Pleas jury in the Liczbinski case sentences Eric Deshann Floyd, 35, and Levon T. Warner, 40, to death. The jury also could sentence them to life in prison without parole for taking part in a Port Richmond bank robbery that turned into a murder when their accomplice, Howard Cain, shot Liczbinski eight times. Police killed Cain later that day.

The most famous condemned cop-killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal, 56, has become a fringe cult hero, an author, a college graduation speaker (pre-recorded) and an honorary citizen of numerous world cities during more than 28 years of confinement.

"The jury found the defendant guilty, and ever since then the defendant has been exercising his constitutional rights to appeal, and we're going to continue exercising our right to try to uphold what the jury's verdict and sentence was," District Attorney Seth Williams said of the Abu-Jamal case.

While conceding that capital murder cases and their appeals are expensive, Williams said that such prosecutions must be pursued in the worst of cases. "Our first decision on prosecuting cases is not one of dollars and cents," Williams said.

"I think people want to make sure that justice is being done," he said. "People like us to spare no expense when it comes to exonerating people that deserve exoneration. People also like to see that we spare no expense when it comes to people that are a true public menace and they have no redeemable social value as a result of this heinous crime."

Once an inmate arrives on death row, it costs Pennsylvania taxpayers $31,106 a year to take care of him or her, the same amount as the system's other 51,000 inmates, said Susan Bensinger, deputy press secretary for the Department of Corrections.

That means that about $6.8 million a year is being spent on the state's 220 death-row inmates. The figure does not include legal bills from trials and appeals. No one was able to say how much that amounted to.

Piccone expressed disgust at what is spent on the care and feeding of condemned inmates. She recalled that during an appeal hearing for her daughter's murderer a fuss arose over whether he had eaten lunch.

"They sit up there and laugh, those prisoners," she said. "They get free food, free everything. We pay for that."

While waiting to be lethally injected, 23 inmates have cheated the executioner by dying since 1988, according to Bensinger.

Of the 215 men and five women living under death sentences, just one inmate has an active death warrant, Bensinger said. Brentt Sherwood, 31, is scheduled to be executed Sept. 16, although that is unlikely to happen.

The other condemned inmates are in various stages of appealing their sentences.

That's how it should be, said Philadelphia defense lawyer Norris E. Gelman, who has had 10 death sentences overturned.

"We're talking about putting someone to death," Gelman said. "We're not talking about a parking ticket.

"We all can agree that if we are going to do something as drastic as putting someone to death, we owe them and ourselves the solace in knowing that we did it constitutionally," Gelman said. "And when it is done unconstitutionally, or in violation of the supreme law of our land, it's the absolute obligation of the federal court to overturn it."

Capital-punishment opponents point to the case of Nicholas Yarris as proof that the system is flawed.

Sentenced to death in 1982 for kidnapping, raping and murdering a woman in Delaware County, Yarris spent 21 years on death row before being exonerated in 2003 when DNA tests proved his innocence.

His was the 13th DNA exoneration from death row nationally, a number that has grown to 17, according to the Innocence Project, which works to free inmates through DNA evidence.

Most death sentences, however, are reversed due to errors made by judges and lawyers during trials. A Columbia University study found that 68 percent of the nation's death-penalty appeals made from 1973 through 1995 were successful.

Said the authors of the 2000 report: "Our 23 years worth of findings reveal a capital punishment system collapsing under the weight of its own mistakes."