hanging an absolute disgrace!, page-18

Well said:

Editorial: Against executions

There is no case that can justify capital punishment
December 02, 2005

THE Government of Singapore was due to murder a man this morning. Certainly, it is acting according to the laws of that country. Certainly, the means of his death is known from long experience to be quick and painless. Certainly, no one in Singapore took any apparent pleasure in the decision that a man should die. But no qualification can disguise that they have planned an act of murder. And there is no explanation, no justification, that can excuse any nation from killing an individual who has broken the law. There never has been and there never will be. For any state to kill a convicted criminal already imprisoned and incapable of doing further harm, is desperately cruel. It is not an act committed in rage or madness. It is not the act of an evil individual killing for gain or to assuage some appalling passion or prejudice. It is not needed to defend the state against enemies within, or to protect the community against imminent harm. The death penalty is an ineffable act of violence against individuals who are defenceless and, at the end of their lives, utterly alone. And the leaders of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, from China to Singapore, that allow executions, are deficient in humanity and reason. The death penalty is wrong - no ifs, no buts.

Advocates of capital punishment advance abstract and emotive arguments in its defence, arguments that are all unconvincing. The death penalty is a necessary deterrent, they say. The certainty of death if convicted of a capital crime discourages people from committing crimes in the first place, and it ends their opportunity to harm more innocent people, they argue. Perhaps it does in some cases, although the American experience does not seem to support this. The US has not become a country free of capital crimes since the Supreme Court decided the death penalty was not unconstitutional in 1976. And in all sorts of countries with capital punishment, greed, stupidity and outright evil will drive men and women to commit heinous crimes. Just ask the Government of Singapore. Additionally, to take a life for the pragmatic reason that it may discourage future crimes sends a clear signal that killing is acceptable when it is done by the state in the national interest. Some supporters of capital punishment also argue that the death penalty provides closure to the victims of crime; that people who have been harmed or have lost a loved one will feel the hurt less if their assailant is executed. Once again, perhaps some do. But however this argument is expressed, it is nothing more than a recipe for revenge, an assertion that the state has the right to take an eye for an eye, a life for a life. And, ultimately, revenge is always an act applied by the powerful against the helpless. It is victor's justice - and more often than not it is no justice at all. From the earliest legal codes, murder has always been forbidden. And if killing is wrong, it is more so when done by the state.

The case for capital punishment fails for many reasons, but above all because it is inhumane and unnatural. It is in human nature to preserve, not take, life. Certainly, wholesale slaughter in war and civil strife is an indisputable fact of history. The genocides and mass murders ordered by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all their evil ilk demonstrate that when states order their citizens to kill, many willingly obey. The record of lynchings in Mississippi during the 1920s, of murderous mobs in Soweto in the 1980s, demonstrates what happens when the protection of the law is not applied to all. But such enormities do not obscure the fact that people have always been appalled by close-quarter killing. In every century, soldiers have had to be conditioned for close-quarter combat. And for all the images from centuries past of crowds delighting in torture and public executions, stable communities have never enjoyed watching the routine mutilation and murder of helpless individuals. Execution is repugnant to us all.

From the 18th century on, as the idea that ordinary people had inviolable rights took hold, nations began to reject state-sanctioned murder. One reason for British settlement of Australia was public discomfort with the prospect of wholesale execution of the enormous number of men and women convicted of capital crimes. Today, with the outrageous exception of the US, nations where political power depends on the electoral assent of the governed are likely to have abandoned capital punishment. And as more and more nations embrace democracy, they will abandon the contradiction of forbidding individuals to kill but allowing the state to commit murder. To assert that states that murder criminals are backward and brutal may offend many nations with which Australia enjoys excellent relations. Tough. It is true.