Supreme Court Decision Shows No Misgivings over Capital Punishment/judges Call Question of Racial Bias 'A Potentially Irrelevant Factor'

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NEW YORK - Is it really a ``potentially irrelevant factor'' - whatever that may mean - that in Georgia from 1973 to 1978 those who murdered white people were 11 times more likely to receive the death penalty than those who killed blacks?

Is is true that American society ``does not reject the death penalty as grossly excessive'' for persons who may have been accomplices in a murder but who did not actually pull the trigger or plunge in the knife?

That's what the Supreme Court has concluded in two death penalty decisions handed down on consecutive days:

- The more important, reached by a 5-4 vote, held that Georgia's capital punishment law was …