The Groan reiterates a well known point that the majority of the UK population favour the death penalty. It carries no surprises and those of us opposed, yet of a liberal bent, find ourselves facing a contradiction of sorts. On the one hand, we believe that the state should be small and representative of the demos’ desires. Given that this may actually mean savagery, we accept that representative democracy is a compromise. Not a particularly good compromise, but one that will have to suffice until we come up with something better.
It is that element of representation that takes the raw edge off the demos’ more primeval will. The double standard occurs when we see those self-same representatives denying us our liberty and doing so using the same tools that we hope they will continue to use when denying the state the right to execute its citizens.
It’s a double standard I can live with. I want the state to be reduced in size. Dramatically reduced to the point where it is all but castrated. And while I share the horror of those who complain about the underclass and its antics in modern Britain, I cannot go along with the idea that the state should carry out the ultimate sanction. Even though I acknowledge that some do deserve it.
Those who argue in favour rightly make the point that it prevents recidivism. No one can argue with that and I wouldn’t want to. I concur; the point has merit. And, when I hear about young men being slaughtered for doing their job, there is a brief, satisfying moment when I mentally picture the perpetrators dangling from a length of hemp.
Yet, despite this, I remain opposed to seeing the death penalty back on the statute book And, yes, I fully expect people to pop in and tell my why it should be. And, yes, doubtless I will concur with many of their points – as I have in the past. This is because I see merit in their arguments. However, I do not accept that the state having decreed that murder is against the law and morally wrong, then has the moral authority to take life in an act of judicial murder. If we say it is wrong, then we do not do it ourselves. I believe that on balance, a full-life tariff as has been handed down to John Sweeney and was served by Myra Hindley is the right one. Death is a cop out. Life without parole is in many ways far more harsh. I cannot imagine spending the rest of my life incarcerated and would choose a quick end rather than endure it.
But, and this has always been my sticking point, if I was innocent of the crime and found myself facing the ultimate sanction, I would not be going quietly into that good night – I would rage, rage against the dying of the light* and rightly so. For, the one sure outcome of a return to capital punishment is that sooner or later, a combination of corruption, piss-poor law and incompetence would lead to an innocent being executed. Better John Sweeney spends a lifetime at her Majesty’s displeasure than one innocent goes to the gallows.
And, one final thought, because it reflects on the very core of that democracy that so much noise is made by so many about so little as if it is a panacea for the world’s ills. That the majority think something is right, does not necessarily make it so.
There’d be less enthusiasm for the death penalty if life meant life.
I agree – and it should.
Does the death penalty actually prevent recidivism?
If it did you’d find that there wouldn’t be any crime that received the death penalty. The fact that in America loads of people still kill each other means that the punishment isn’t working. The issue is that most murders are committed when emotions are running high, so the punishement is the last thing a perp is going to think of.
Once you’ve executed someone, they don’t repeat the offence, so, yes it does prevent recidivism.
I suspect you are arguing that it doesn’t act as a deterrent. And in that you’d be right.
You dont need to reintroduce the death penalty.
Make those convicted of heinous crimes serve their sentence alongside the normal criminals instead of in high cost,high security prisons and do away with suicide watch.
I reckon people would think twice before raping hundreds of grannies if they knew they would end thier days in a crowded shower room whilst the guards were busy filling out forms.
You will find no disagreement from this direction. Having strong desires for the death penalty for specific individuals is both human and equally does not mean it should be so. If life means whole life imprisonment mistakes can be rectified, and recividism is (largely) avoided. But when life means 8 or 10 or 12 years, as JuliaM points out, the hunger for revenge is unsated.
I think it’s a good idea. I didn’t always. I’d support reintroducing the death penalty along with authoritarian prisons, sentences that actually meant something, and the rest of the Peter Hitchens conservative manifesto.
You can rest assured that there is no need to convince me otherwise. It does not matter what I think. The popular support for hanging means that there will never be a referendum on this matter. My interest is purely intellectual.
But I do have some comments.. just little things to think about. Firstly, I disagree with calling it “judicial murder”. Firstly, murder means something quite specific: “unlawful killing of a person”. Thus, “judicial murder” is an oxymoron.
Secondly, this term implies that there is such a thing as “lawful killing”. And of course there is. Consider abortion, or warfare, or euthanasia. All of these involve lawful killing. If these things are ever right, and I make no comment about them, then it is surely even more right to kill someone convicted of a very serious crime, after a fair trial.
Thirdly, it seems quite arbitrary to distinguish between permanently removing someone’s liberty, and killing them. There is an important psychological distinction – horror and fear are major benefits of capital punishment – but in reality the two are pretty similar. The criminal loses his life.
Longrider,
your position may contradict democracy, but so what? Liberty is more important. Government power must be limited. By all means it should be democratically accountable, but limited nonetheless, and there are reasons to believe the state cannot be trusted with the death penalty, no matter how much some people deserve it (and they surely do).
I won’t enter into the argument, as it’s been done to death (ahem). There are more important changes I would like to see to the criminal justice system, some mentioned above. Julia makes a very good point, for instance. My main pipe dream on this subject is about reducing the criminal law down to, say, 20 felonies which could be learned by heart by anyone who so wished, and a far greater degree of uniformity in sentencing, which involved the principle of doubling the sentence every time someone gets reconvicted. I also want the principle of restitution made paramount, so that the criminal must pay back double what harm they did, and finally, as a riposte to all those woolly-heads who talk about what works and give statistics, I suggest a paraphrase of Herbert Spencer: sometimes it’s easier to know what’s right than what’s expedient.
“That the majority think something is right, does not necessarily make it so.”
I couldnt agree more. I do think sentancing should be meaningful for crimes with actual victims but cannot agree with the death penalty.
A death sentence is irreversible. If an innocent gets locked up for life then he can be released and compensated. Yes you’ve taken away some of his life but life isn’t fair and sometimes you just get (really really) unlucky.
“That the majority think something is right, does not necessarily make it so.”
That’s the argument Dave is using against a EU referendum.
Personally, I think that if people want the death penalty they should move somewhere that has it. Just like people should be free to set up a voluntary socialist commune. This may mean Yorkshire becomes an independent country or something like that.
Doesn’t make it any less true, though.
I oppose the death penalty on the grounds that the courts will at some point make a mistake and as you say, you can release someone from prison, you cannot make a dead person come alive.
However I do not view prison as mainly a punishment, it should exist to remove offenders from society (Many offenders, if not most grow up and largely stop offending at some point) and to provide a deterrant. That it is also a punishment is largely coincidental.
Assuming this is the case then life meaning life seems overly cruel. If a person is convicted of an act or acts that lead a judge to decide that they can never be released, then assuming they are actually guilty, the punishment seems to be punishment for punishments sake.
Maybe instead of the state ordering the execution the sentenced could choose death, to be executed instead of serving the sentence. Or as an alternative after a certain length of time (to give the wrongly convicted a chance to overcome the shock and depression of injustice)a rope or equivilent could be provided in the cell to allow them to choose a quick way out.
XX Does the death penalty actually prevent recidivism?
If it did you’d find that there wouldn’t be any crime that received the death penalty.
Comment by SadButMadLad XX
You are mixing up “recidivism” with “Preventative”. Try buying a fucking DICTIONARY.
However the “preventative” argument is bollocks. If it DOES prevent, that is only an additional benefit. However,, you do not shoot a dangerous rabid dog to teach your Fido not to catch rabies. You shoot it to rid the world of an unreasoning, beyond hope, vicious and dangerous animal.
EXACTLY like ” judicial execution”.
The Guardian article quotes Micheal Howard -“I accepted that you could never completely eliminate the chance of a mistake and since then I have been averse to the idea of the state deliberately taking someone’s life.”
However ‘the State’ continues to authorise its agents to do so – in defined circumstances – WITHOUT going through the process of trial & conviction.
“That the majority think something is right, does not necessarily make it so.”
So, those that think it is not right, their opinion somehow carries more weight than those that think it is right? Who decrees what is “right”? Who made them god?
You’re constructing a strawman there. My comment is simply an obervation of fact. Might does not necessarily mean right. The majority does not necessarily have all the answers, much as they would like to think so. Einsten’s comment about one fact destroying a consensus puts it just as well.
There was a time when the majority thought that disease was caused by miasma and before that by an imbalance in the humours. There was a time when the majority thought that the sun revolved around the Earth. I could go on, but my point is made. The majority was spectacularly wrong.
What makes that minority opinion carry weight? The facts, inconvenient though they may be.
With this subject, the inconvenient facts are:
The death penalty does not act as a deterrent.
Innocent people get executed.
Whatever arguments are put forward in favour, they still cannot overcome these two facts.
“The death penalty does not act as a deterrent.
Innocent people get executed.”
It would be interesting to compare the figures of how many innocent people have been executed versus how many murderers have re-offended following release. Say over the last couple of centuries.
Can you suggest any penalty that does act as a deterrent to murder? If not, it is not a valid argument against the death penalty.
We (society) punish for several reasons. Retribution and prevention of recidivism – the death penalty fulfils those. Deterrent? Maybe, maybe not. Rehabilitation – no. But in any case I suspect that most people in favour of the death penalty would only have it for the worst cases, so rehabilitation is not ruled out.
No. There will always be those who think they can get away with it or the risk is worth taking. And there will always be the heat of the moment crimes where aforethought doesn’t enter into the equation. However, the deterrent effect is an argument used by the pro-lobby. It is an argument that simply does not stand scrutiny. If it did, those states that have it wouldn’t ever use it.
While I agree it would be interesting to see the figures over the past couple of centuries, it doesn’t affect the core argument. You can prevent repeat offences very easily without capital punishment. If you have capital punishment, you cannot prevent wrongful execution while we have a flawed justice system such as ours – the burden of proof is far too weak. The argument here isn’t that those re-offenders should have been executed, it’s that the full life tariff wasn’t applied as it should have been.
One innocent executed is one too many.
“One innocent executed is one too many.”
Precisely. And who is to say that one of those here advocating the death penalty would not be that innocent executed by mistake, police bungling, cover-up or cop-out?
For me, whole life sentences should be reserved for those who have killed with pre-meditation or intent or such sheer recklessness that they should have foreseen the consequences. That would cover the guy who chopped up his girlfriends and dumped them in canals, the drug-fuelled ASBO-adorned thug walking around with a blade, and those who drive drunk or carelessly and kill. Into the latter category would fall the unrepetent ***** who killed the husband of a friend of mine because she was in too much of a hurry to stop at a T-junction. She got 100 hours ‘unpaid work’ and a 6 month ban. And she appealed that, unsuccessfully.
Please remember that it is not ONLY the death penalty that is ‘irreversible’ after wrongful conviction.
See the case of Stefan Kiszko (Wiki has a comprehensive article)- and note that ‘whole life’ sentences required an admission of guilt before one can be considered for Parole – which Kiszko steadfastly refused to do.
He died before most of his ‘compensation’ was paid…
Stefan Kisko is one of the most powerful arguments against the death penalty. You can add Sally Clarke and the other women convicted of infanticide during the nineties based upon flawed evidence.
The parole conundrum is a typical catch 22 of a deeply flawed and corrupt system that fails to acknowledge that it might have got it wrong – this, despite the clear evidence of its failures. An innocent person is never going to admit guilt and express contrition if they are innocent.
Stefan Kisko is one of the most powerful arguments against the death penalty
Doubly so because the police knowingly failed to disclose evidence that proved that Stefan was physically incapable of the murder. That makes me not only an steadfast opponent of the death penalty but also the British police force, who are to a man, worthless sewage.
It wasn’t just in the Kisko case that something like this happened. The police were well aware that they’d got the wrong people long before they Guildford four were released.
While we have a system that puts pressure on the police to secure convictions, they will always be tempted to go for the easy option. It’s human nature.
Having been a bit busy lately and only now catching up on my blog reading I’m a bit late to this. I’m anti-capital punishment for a few reasons, that they screw up and execute innocents and that it’s not a deterrent (it just deters normal people like us) actually being the less important ones. I don’t subscribe to the rabid dog argument for execution either, since I’m reluctant to write off anyone as absolutely and without doubt completely irredeemable. Probably irredeemable, yes, but when we complain about early release because we can’t be sure a prisoner is reformed we must realise that we can’t be sure someone is incurably criminal either. Rabies is occasionally curable.
But for me those are all side arguments. The big one, which hasn’t really been covered here yet, is the possibility of ‘mission creep’. Bring back executions for the worst and most despicable crimes and there will eventually be a case where it’s almost but not quite vile and despicable enough, and there will be people demanding the law be changed to allow such people to be executed too. Worse, there may be a change of government that decides to extend use of capital punishment off its own back. This has happened: the Weimar Republic kept it on the books and did indeed execute a relative handful, but when Hitler came to power he extended it to the point of executing thousands and thousands, even chopping off the heads of students for suggesting that the war was maybe not such a brilliant idea. Those of us who loudly and frequently criticise our politicians and governing classes do so in the knowledge that whatever else happens we’re not going to end up like Sophie Scholl. I might be prepared to concede the Nazi example as a one off if it wasn’t for the fact that this is just an extreme example. Uganda has extended capital punishment for homosexuality, various eastern nations will execute you for smuggling fairly modest amounts of soft drugs, and Singapore even allows it for unlawful discharge of a firearm. What’s unlawful? Don’t know, but I’d point out that if Tony Martin had been burgled in Singapore he might well have done rather more than three of five years even if he’d missed both the burglars. Christ, a negligent discharge might well be unlawful in many situations. And if we think it couldn’t possibly happen in the UK because the government just doesn’t do that kind of thing then we might want to remember that among other abuses of law the UK uses anti-terrorist legislation to detain and search innocent photographers and RIPA to spy its own citizens.
In short you not only have to have absolute trust in the current government that they will not abuse a reinstated death penalty, but also the next government, and the next one and every one that comes after. I wouldn’t trust me with that power, much less a self righteous prick like Bliar, a psychotic control freak like Brown, or a populist knob gobbler like Cameramong. And since we can’t predict the future for all we know these three cock slots might actually be much better and more sensible PMs than average for the rest of this century.
I used to support the death penalty until that occurred to me, and seeing that film about Sophie Scholl that came out a few years back only reinforced my opposition. I’ve said any number of times that if that problem can be overcome I’d be prepared to reconsider my position on the death penalty and probably become a supporter again. Still waiting for someone to suggest something.