It is one of the greatest ironies of our time that the nation to which the world looks for a lead on human rights should be so obsessed with inflicting the death penalty. It is hardly a cure for violent crimes - this escalates most strikingly in those states (notably Texas and Florida) which conduct most executions, variously by firing squad, hanging, gas chambers, electrocution, and lethal injection. No procedure is painless.
[...]
The death penalty does not deter murder. On the contrary, I believe that it tends to increase it by socially sanctioning violent revenge. America is an abiding testament to the objective futility of capital punishment: in the year Pratt and Morgan was decided, the country sustained 24 000 murders - a colossal level of deadly violence in a nation which believes that executions will have some effect on reducing it. All the executions in the US can have no conceivable impact other than to contribute to a culture in which violence is perceived as a solution, or at least as an exercise which achieves something. What it has achieved is a perversion of the values of lawyers: prosecutors demand the death penalty with more vigour (and hence more publicity for themselves) as their re-election nears; defenders advise their clients, despite their protestations of innocence, to cop pleas of 'guilty' to second-degree murder in order to avoid the risk of a death sentence; judges owe advancement to their record in refusing stays of execution. You cannot blame politicians for taking actions which court popularity - that is their raison d'etre - but the reason for the existence of courts is to stop those of their actions which infringe fundamental human rights. American judges, by permitting the execution of juveniles and mentally handicapped persons, have betrayed the very purpose of their office, which is to deny that the will of the people is the supreme law whenever that will inclines to barbarism.
The philosophical advance made by British judges through their decision in Pratt and Morgan was that murderers condemned to their death did not for that reason lose their quality as human beings. In legal terms, that a constitution guaranteeing fundamental rights to all citizens extended to those on death row as much as it did to those anywhere else: that the condemned prisoner no less than the terminally ill hospital patient is entitled to treatment which comports as much with dignity as their different circumstances allow. Is this capable of striking a transatlantic chord?
[...]
...criminology provided ample evidence that capital punishment does not reduce crime, and the briefest acquaintance with the American statistics proved that the death penalty is inflicted unequally, arbitrarily and especially on the poor and the black. But statistics can prove anything or nothing; even were it demonstrated that capital punishment had some deterrent effect, the transient and spiritually crippling satisfaction of revenge cannot justify the setting of a grisly example by a justice system which should be committed to promoting the values of humanity.
I am not opposed to summary execution, in cases of necessity: the gunning down of tyrants, and of armed robbers, hostage-takers and terrorists caught in the act. This is poetic justice, in the simple sense that it serves them right. The mistake is to use the legal system in an attempt to dignify killing by the state. This was Winston Churchill's point, in his much misunderstood argument that Nazi leaders should be taken out and shot rather than put through what he thought would be the charade of a trial at Nuremberg. He feared that any aping of legal proceedings would give them more dignity in their deaths than in their lives. It was the mistake the Rumanians made when they gave the Ceausescus the mockery of a trial before shooting them: it was necessary to kill them, to avoid their secret police rallying to their cause, but that was a practical political decision, not a just or legal one. The court-approved death penalty is wrong. And a system that is committed to the righting of wrongs cannot be used to perpetrate one.
Capital punishment incites vicious behaviour, not only in prisoners on death row, but in the officials charged with their execution. [...] Behind all the truculence and dishonesty of State officials lies a grim determination to kill - not merely as machines performing the dictates of the court, or as honest executors of the will of the people, but as human beings consumed by a positive wish to take other human life. The saddest thing is the sheer waste of energy on all sides. But in the final analysis there is no new argument to be raised against capital punishment. John Bright said it all in 1850: 'If you wish to teach the people to reverence human life, you must first show that you reverence it yourselves.'
