Consistently Opposing the Death Penalty

Over at the Telegraph there's a rather silly article accusing those who oppose the death penalty of being inconsistent. The gist of it can be summed up in the following paragraph:

The airbrushing of Brewer from yesterday’s heated discussions on the death penalty speaks volumes about the Troy Davis campaign. It seems pretty clear that it was motivated, not by a principled, across-the-board opposition to the state killing of citizens, but rather by campaigners’ desire to indulge in some very public moral preening. Unlike the Brewer execution, which was ugly and complicated, the Davis execution could be squeezed into a cosy moral narrative in which the state of Georgia was depicted as backward and racist and those who opposed the execution of Davis presented themselves as purer than pure, good and decent, and more than willing to prove it by writing tweets of concern every four or five minutes. What message should we take from this disparity in campaigning? That Troy Davis did not deserve to die but Lawrence Brewer did? Such moral flightiness, such brutal arbitrariness, reveals much about today’s very changeable campaigners against the death penalty.

Of course, I can only speak for myself, and I do concede that there may well be some people who oppose the death penalty who do fall into the description given above. But, even as I speak only for myself, I would like to say that the author is talking utter shit. Let me explain why.

I became aware of the execution of Brewer on the Thursday morning, when it was mentioned at the very bottom of an article on a news website on the Davis case (can't remember which one - think it may well have been the BBC site). I guess there wasn't quite the same publicity given to the Brewer case as there was to the Davis case. Gee, I wonder why that might be? Perhaps because Davis was almost certainly innocent while Brewer wasn't? Could that be part of the reason?

But that doesn't change the fact that I can categorically state that as repugnant and vile as I find Brewer and his crime, I don't believe that he should have been executed as the state should not have the right to kill its citizens, even if they have committed heinous crimes. Both Brewer and Davis should be alive today; one should be incarcerated for life, the other probably shoud have been released on appeal by now.

Does that mean that the anti-death penalty campaigners made a mistake in highlighting the Davis case rather than the Brewer one? No. There was an opporunity to save an almost certainly innocent man from the needle. It had to be prioritised over the other morally unacceptable death than happened on the same day. In part because there was a real chance that at least one execution could have been prevented, whereas I think nothing could have saved Brewer. But there is also a pragmatic side to publicising the Davis case over the Brewer one. People might sit up and listen to the ant-death penalty case when the hear the Davis story; the Brewer one will do little to change the minds of people if they think that certain people deserve to die. Just as in this country, the miscarriages of justice that were the Bentley case and the Evans case, not the executions of a Christie or a Haigh, that moved Britain away from hanging.

So there is no inconsistency in my personal opposition to the death penalty; but the pragmatist in me does understand that the way in which the US is most likely to leave the appalling and barbaric practice of executing criminals is through highlighting likely miscarriages of justice rather than the cases of thorougly unpleasant criminals.