Man, proud man (Capital punishment)

Member Name: Athanasius Green

Product:	Capital punishment
Date:	25/01/01 (110 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It will deter some people from murdering

Disadvantages: We will execute innocent people

If you believe in Capital Punishment, you must have a profound belief in both lawyers and policemen.

When Timothy Evans was pardoned in 1966 (16 years after he had been wrongly hanged after allegedly strangling to death his baby daughter), one of the effects of that decision was to weaken the almost superstitious belief in the infallibility of British justice that many people held at the time.

Lawyers get things wrong sometimes. The police get things wrong sometimes too. They are even more likely to get things wrong when they have the dragon of public outrage breathing fire down their neck. In other words, the worst crimes have, I suspect, an even higher likelihood of a miscarriage of justice. (There's even a good case to suggest that Dr. Crippen was wrongly hanged. If only Marshall Hall had conducted his defence.)

As a simple example, I can remember the hysteria that surrounded the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bomb in the late 1970's - a grotesque act of mass murder. I also, briefly, met one of the men sent to jail for that murder shortly before he was, quite rightly, released. I also remember the veneer of certainty that covered that conviction, assisted by the hi-tec forensic science techniques of the time ... techniques that were subsequently shown to be deeply flawed.

With Capital Punishment, there's also the fraught question of line-drawing. Despite all appearances it's very difficult to write a law that can neatly distinguish between the crime of passion on the one hand and the sadistic act of premeditated murder on the other. That is one of the reasons why it was abolished in the UK in the 1960's - the ludicrous inequalities created by the distinction between capital and non-capital murder. Sometimes those who sadistically and premeditatedly murder have been, in some measure, provoked by their victim. Handy dandy, which is the justice and which is the thief?

I am deeply suspicious of theori
es of punishment founded on the idea of deterrence, and murder's a real good case of the inadequacy of deterrence. Those least likely to be deterred are, ironically, those most likely to elicit public sympathy - the battered wife, the crime of passion. Those most likely to be deterred are those who commit for calculated reasons usually relating to property and profit (contract killers, greedy relatives).

Although retribution is a much sounder rationale for punishment ("the punishment fits the crime"), it too doesn't help. I know people whose lives have been appallingly blighted by a single act of mugging or a burglary. These people often nurse a rage in their heart towards those who injured them so great that they too call for the death penalty for mugging and for burglary. Indeed, mugging and burglary were once capital offences in the UK.

All of this is exacerbated by the terrible morbid fixation of the public for the activities of sadists (viz. the number of newspapers that can be sold by mention of the name of Myra Hindley). And there's a sadistic bit of our imagination that likes the idea of inflicting extreme pain on the worst perpetrators. Their sadism seems to license ours.

The very worst punishment that can be inflicted on the worst perpatrators is to do everything we can to confront them with the wickedness of their actions and lead them genuinely to repent. Doing that is extremely difficult, but it needs to be done all the same.

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