NEWS CONFERENCE 411

A. I'm giving a lot of thought to it. I find it's a very difficult subject,
and how to implement what we know should be done by way of safe-
guard is not the easiest thing in the world. Most of the bills say a per-
son who commits a murder in the course of his incarceration for an-
other crime, and where he kills a guard or he kills a police officer in the
execution of his duty, this should be an exception and the death pen-
alty should be applied. I don't find this easy for me to accept on the
basis that not only the guard and the police officer should be protected,
but society generally should be protected. On the other hand, I think
there's no deterrent at all for a person who would commit a murder
while he is incarcerated. If he's been punished to the maximum the
law will allow, he could commit a murder every day without being
treated any worse. And these things are seemingly irreconcilable con-
flicts, and those points of view when weighed with the basic concept of
all modern theories about correction, that we should be trying to re-
habilitate people, make it so difficult to come to a definitive law that's
going to touch all these situations properly, that it frightens me. I
think that some day we're going to have to come up and wrestle with
this problem and do it right.

Q. If the bill is introduced in the next session of the Legislature,
would you be the first to support it?

A. I would have to see the bill.

NEWS CONFERENCE
September 21, 1967

OPENING STATEMENT BY THE GOVERNOR

I would like to begin, ladies and gentlemen, by to some extent re-
peating what happened this morning as a result of a meeting I had
with Mayor McKeldin, Mr. Schaefer, and Mr. Gallagher of the City
Council, Mr. Phil Darling of the Mayor's staff and Mr. Wolff of the
State Roads Commission. I had talked today with Mr. Lowell Bridwell,
who is the Undersecretary of Transportation and also happens to be
the Federal Highways Administrator, concerning the progress of un-
locking the apparently relocked situation of the East-West Expressway
and particularly of the southwest leg.

Mr. Bridwell assured me this morning that Secretary Boyd had ap-
proved the design concept team, that this should be open news by