James Garry: Failing Yet Again to Defend the Death Penalty

In a post that manages to be simultaneously a bit petulant and utterly insipid, James Garry has responded to my deconstruction of his argument on the death penalty. I've only just come across it and I've no desire to go through Garry's response* to my post in any real detail - life is too short to start the world's most boring flame war - but I did just want to respond to some of the more blatant misrepresentations of my arguments. First up:

I had meant to respond earlier to “The Nameless Libertarian’s” latest submission in our exchange on the death penalty but this is the first opportunity I have had since its publication. He’s one of the less better-mannered opponents as he can’t keep up an exchange without resorting to abuse (often a sign that my interlocutor is running out of rope, if that’s not too appropriate an analogy). And where there isn’t abuse there is poorly constructed argument.

I have to say that I am mildly amused to be accused here of being "less better-mannered" and of "abuse". While regular readers will know that I do use fruity language on occasion and will give abuse to deserving targets, I've actually been quite polite to Garry in my exchanges with him. And while it is tempting to give him both barrels now in terms of abuse, I really can't be bothered. So instead I'll say that the delicate flower probably needs to develop a thicker skin.

Take the title of his latest instalment, for instance. “Garry: Still failing to defend the death penalty”. I do not “fail” to defend the death penalty, I just don’t convert “The Nameless Libertarian” to my way of thinking. Which was never my intention. Even if I presented a treatise that “The Nameless Libertarian” found successful, it wouldn’t change his opinion. What he really means is that I fail to defend the death penalty because I do not agree with him.

Nope. What I mean when I say Garry has failed to defend the death penalty is, well, that he's failed to defend the death penalty. His case is so weak as to be largely useless. Sorry, Garry, but you do fail. But that's window-dressing. The biggest way in which Garry, wilfully or otherwise, misrepresents me and my argument is here:

I’ll repeat what he wrote: “[C]riminals are not thinking about the consequences of their actions because they do not expect to be caught”. Note the two verbs in this sentence – to think and to expect. In this context, they mean pretty much the same thing. The verb “to expect” implies some sort of thought process. In other words, “Criminals are not thinking about the consequences of their actions because they do not think they will be caught.” I would like to be able to ascribe this paradoxical construction to the author’s craft, though I suspect this grammatical fallacy was an accident. If criminals think (i.e., “expect”) that they will not be caught for committing a crime then they must know that there is punishment associated with being caught. In which case, criminals must be thinking about the consequences of their actions.

There is only one other way that “The Nameless Libertarian’s” sentence can be rendered: “Criminals are not thinking about the consequences of their actions because they cannot expect to be caught.” (That is, they lack the faculty that causes them to expect punishment). This is an even more precarious piece of reasoning. If this is the argument that “The Nameless Libertarian” intends to submit, then it is an example of petitio principii, also known as ”begging the question”.

We can dismiss the second argument as it is weak and simply incorrect. As for the first one, the words "think" and "expect" clearly have different meanings, even in this context. Don't believe me? Well, an expectation is different to a thought; if in doubt, consult a dictionary. But let's look at the context here and what I am actually saying. I am saying that criminals do not expect to be caught, and consequently they are not thinking about it when they commit their crimes. That does not mean they have never thought about the potential consequences of their actions; just that their expectations of not being caught mean they do not need to think about those consequences when perpetrating their actions. To use an analogy; I do not expect to be hit by a car when I dart across the road before the green man come on at the pedestrian crossing. That does not mean that I have never thought at all about one possible consequence of my action; rather, that I am not thinking about it when I carry out that action - perhaps because other thoughts are more pressing in my mind.

Garry asserts that I am begging the question; I'd argue that he is creating a straw man argument.

“The Nameless Libertarian” proceeds to cite Ian Brady as a reason for abolishing the death penalty because Ian Brady did not “take into account the potential consequences of [his] actions.” Really? Is he on record as saying he didn’t know the consequences of his actions? Have any credible experts said that Ian Brady did not know the consequences of his actions?

Why not assume equally that Brady did know the consequences of his actions and decided that the risk of prison was worth less than the pleasure of satisfying his murderous lusts?

Here, Garry seems to be missing the point of the work Brady is doing in my argument. The point is not that Brady may have thought that prison was worth the risk of child rape and murder; it is that he committed child rape and murder when the threat was not just of prison, but of prison and the noose. This is what is fatal to Garry's argument that the death penalty is a deterrent; Brady committed those crimes when he was running the risk of the death penalty. It would be good if Garry was actually engaging with the argument rather than another straw man representation of it. Again.

And let me respond to Garry's turgid attempts at pedantry with a turgid example of my own. Garry asserts that I cite Brady as "a reason for abolishing the death penalty". Now, there are two ways to interpret this - either that Garry thinks that I believe Brady to be a reason why the death penalty was abolished, which is just blatantly untrue, or that he forms part of my case for abolishing the death penalty. Of course, I don't need to make a case for the death penalty to be abolished as, well, it has been abolished. Rather, I am using Brady as an example to refute the essential predicate of Garry's case; that the fear of the noose will stop the likes of Brady. Put simply, it didn't.

But let's pretend for the moment that we are dealing with an eloquent, reasonable and persuasive person, and that Garry's post is 100% spot on. Yeah, I know, we're heading into the realms for fantasy here, but bear with me. Even if this had happened, it misses a salient point. Early on in his "argument", Garry writes that the extent to which murderers think about the potential consequences of their crime is central to my argument. This is not true. It may be important for the point I was trying to make about Garry's deterrence argument, but it is not my central point against the death penalty. And that point is the moral argument against state-sanctioned murder - a point which Garry, for all of his semantic pedantry, has spectacularly failed to address. No doubt Garry's response, should he make one, would centre on how the moral argument was not necessarily the point he wished to pursue. And that's fine. But it is also why, alongside his faulty logic and his straw man arguments, he is still failing to make the case for the death penalty.

*I'm linking to his post despite the fact, in breach of much blogging etiquette, he did not link to mind. What an ill-mannered young man!

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.

The Killing of Troy Davis

Now, my thoughts on the death penalty are on record, and there is nothing in the events surrounding the state-sanctioned murder of Troy Davis that has changed my mind in any way. In fact, the opposite is true. It isn't just the moral case against the death penalty that is brought into sharp relief by this execution, but also the extent to which the decision to execute, the run-up to any execution and the implementation of that execution all highlight how the death penalty is not about the emotionless and dispassionate administration of justice, but rather as tangled a mess as any system created and run by fallible humans inevitably ends up being.

Let's look at the evidence that led Davis - or more properly meant that Davis was led - into the execution chamber. The lack of a gun and of any DNA evidence meant the case against him at his original trial was far from conclusive. The fact that the vast majority of those witnesses who led to his conviction have recanted their testimony makes that evidence even less conclusive. And the fact that one of those two remaining witnesses who have not recanted is also a suspect in the murder that earned Davis the death penality is yet another indicator that all is not right in the conviction that led to the execution of Davis. Had I been on the jury at Davis' initial trial, I probably wouldn't have convicted. I certainly wouldn't based on the evidence (of lack thereof) floating around just before he got the needle. It appears a man who was most likely innocent was put to death in the state of Georgia. Of course, I can't know for certain that he was innocent - indeed, that level of knowledge is arguably impossible except for the murderer and the murdered. But we've not talking here about a sentence that can be reversed. Davis died. He was killed by the state. There is no going back on this. Now, I understand that it is perfectly possible that we will never come up with a justice system that can guarantee that it is not convicting the innocent. But that is precisely why we shouldn't have the death penalty - an innocent in prison can be released. An innocent in the ground can't.

Yet there are other reasons some argue should make us ok with the death penalty. After all, with the introduction of the lethal injection, it surely became just a case of putting people to sleep. Of course, the idea that humans should just be put to sleep, like sick dogs, is inhumane to some - even if they are (apparently) guilty of the most heinous crimes. But even the supposedly painless lethal injection can end up being anything but. Take the execution that had to be abandoned as the executioners couldn't get the IV line into their victim's veins. Or the prisoner whose execution lasted for 90 minutes. Or the condemned man who had to be given a double dose of the lethal chemical cocktail. Or even the poor sod whose execution went on for so long that he had to be given a toilet break*. I think all of these could be seen to be cruel and unusual punishments, but they also highlight that the notion of the clean, sterile, painless execution is a myth. And that's before we get onto whether the lethal injection is actually painless. Or the fact that its creator argues that it is flawed because he never realised when he helped to set up the execution method that "complete idiots" would be "administering the drugs." As for the deterrence argument, the research is far from conclusive. The experts can't agree. And when it comes to taking the lives of potentially innocent people, is a little consensus on the wider implications on society too much to ask?

So to summarise, we have a system that executes people who are almost certainly innocent. It isn't, at least in its existing forms, painless or humane - not least because it is implemented by people incapable of doing so properly. And is it a deterrent? Fuck knows. Yet it is something that doesn't make sense that can also carry an appalling cost, as the Troy Davis case shows. And as a result I can't help but think that we shouldn't be debating the potential reintroduction of the death penalty on this side of the Atlantic - rather, they should be debating it's abolition on the other side of that ocean.

*And isn't that a good indicator of the total insanity of executions? They pump the victim full of lethal drugs, but he get's a bathroom break so he doesn't piss himself.

Get involved, while you still can. Because with this one, it could end up being too late far too soon.

Garry: Still failing to defend the death penalty

Over at the curiously named Politics on Toast, James Garry takes exception to one of my posts on the death penalty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is this post that provokes his article; the one that takes him to task. There is a lot in his article, and the vast majority of it I do not care about. However, there are some points that demand rebuttal and clarification. This first is Garry’s attempt to overcome my objection that some criminals commit their crimes without really considering the potential consequences on the grounds that they do not expect to be caught. He writes in response to this assertion:

Nonsense. TNL seems to suggest that criminals can only know the consequences of their actions after they are caught.

Nope. I suggest that criminals are not thinking about the consequences of their actions because they do not expect to be caught – a position that is intuitively plausible given how many people commit crimes that carry hefty sentences.

I think very few criminals are so boundlessly optimistic or boundlessly stupid not to impute the legal consequences of their illegal actions. We are all potential criminals. I am a potential criminal.

Yes, Garry, you are a potential criminal. We all are. But there are degrees of potential criminality, aren’t there? And there are degrees of the potentiality of all of us to actually commit crimes. Just as there are differences in the extent to which any one of us believe we will be caught for any crime that we might commit, and there are varying degrees to which we all understand the consequences of any potential crime. To argue otherwise is to deny the nature of the individual. Which, surely, Garry does not wish to do. Oh, wait:

I know the possible consequences of any given criminal action. I don’t see how actual criminals are any different.

Yeah, Garry. You are representative of all actual criminals. They all think in the same way you do. They all know the consequences of their actions. Except there is no-one quite like James Garry, and different individuals will have different motivations and perceptions.

For TNL’s argument to have a kernel of credibility then every single murderer would have to be completely blank about the consequences of his actions. If that were the case then we could agree that capital punishment is worthless because the criminal is impervious to its threat. Plainly this isn’t so. Some murderers may be so far removed from reality that they are oblivious to the promise of the noose, but most murderers are rational and aware of the law and of the consequences of their actions.

Nope, this is toss, I'm afraid. For my argument to “have a kernel of credibility” there has to be just one killer who does not take into account the potential consequences of their actions. Which, as the example of Ian Brady in my original post, demonstrates is possible. But Garry sort of acknowledges in his article, before going on to write:

There are no doubt others still who would not be deterred by the death penalty from murdering. I am not a Utopian. I do not believe in a perfect world of perfect solutions. If we did not use human systems because they were imperfect, we’d never use any of them. TNL, and people like him, do not understand this point:
We do not use deterrents against people who cannot be deterred. We use deterrents against those who can be deterred. To abandon the use of capital punishment because it does not deter the Ian Bradys of this world is as bit like not fitting your car with airbags because airbags are not 100% effective. I wonder, with the use of this easy-to-understand analogy, TNL might grasp this very simple point.

Oh, how I do love to be condescended and patronised by someone who thinks that they know better than me with no real evidence as to why they might actually do so bar their own stridently expressed opinions. I do understand that we have to use imperfect systems – not being a total fucking idiot makes understanding this point really rather easy. But it is one thing not to use an imperfect system and quite another to endow an imperfect political system with the right to take the lives of innocent citizens after going through the imperfect system of a jury trial. I’ll try to resist the cheap jibe that this sort of simple argument seems to be beyond Garry and his ilk.

Unfortunately, the analogy does not work as there is no real connection between airbags and an innocent person being hanged. It is a classic straw man argument, and deserves to be treated largely with contempt.

I don’t see how it is nonsense. It does make me angry when people say that capital punishment is wrong because it involves the State murdering its own citizens. It makes me angry because TNL – probably without much thought – gives parity to the murderer and the murderer’s victim.

No I don’t. This completely misrepresents my opinion and what I have repeatedly said. I give parity to the innocent killed by a murderer and an innocent killed by the state on the grounds that both are, well, innocent. The central point is the innocence, and until someone can provide a system whereby innocent people won’t face the noose, then this remains an essential point and a highly convincing rebuttal to those who favour the return of the death penalty.
And, for the record, I have given a lot of fucking thought to all aspects of the death penalty while researching and debating it across decades. This sort of cheap gibe from Garry really pisses me off. It is exactly the same as when he says that people have not read what he has written or not understood it. It is the fascinating arrogance of a man who assumes that he is right and that others cannot have an equally valid position. It runs the risk of making debating with him compellingly pointless.

The Nameless Libertarian’s ultimate objection to State execution is a libertarian one – that the State should not be vested with the power to murder.

No, my ultimate objection to state murder is a moral one – as explained here. But as an add-on, yeah, I don’t think we should give the state the right to murder their citizens.

I do not understand libertarians. They automatically think the powers of the State must be limited.

Nope. We argue that the state should be limited based on the fact that it has been historically shown that the state is more often than not inept, bureaucratic and inhuman.

Well, I believe that the State should be limited but I also accept that the State must have some power to do certain things some of the time. As much as I hated nannying New Labour, I think the only good thing they did was to implement the smoking ban. Of course, this is a State intrusion and many, including Claire Porthouse, think it is a horrendous act of State intrusion. Maybe it is. But I wonder if the ban extends into the future, that we might realise the goodness of this act of State intrusion in a hundred year’s time or so.

Of course, it is completely inappropriate to compare the potential state murder of an innocent person with the smoking ban. As for that ban itself, it is possible that in the future people do look back on the smoking ban as a great step forward, especially if biased history books present it as such. That won’t change the reality of the situation – that people are told that they cannot choose, despite being responsible adults, to smoke in certain places. It won’t change the fact that this policy seems to be almost intentionally trying to make the people of this country more bovine than ever. And there is a terrible irony in someone advocating the potential prolonging of the lives of some through the smoking ban at the same time as embracing the concept of the noose for some innocent people is good.

Giving the State the power to execute criminals who ruin the lives of innocent people is good.

But that is not the point, as surely Garry knows. The point is that innocent people as well as criminals will be executed. Is that OK? Of course it isn’t. But it is a fundamental point that Garry's sweeping statement ignores.

Why assume that all State power is bad?

State power is, for most libertarians, a necessary evil. Therefore, as an evil, it needs to be restricted as much as possible. And it certainly does not need to be extended to give the state the right to potentially kill innocent people if the right legal loopholes have been jumped through.

If that is so, why bother voting?

Err, to support the party offering the least state intervention in our lives?

Why bother supporting the political parties who become and organise the State.

I don’t support any party, but I’d imagine it is for the reason mentioned immediately above.

Why even bother pretending to be a “libertarian”? Just become an anarchist instead.

Because being a libertarian is different to being an anarchist. In fact, I’ve written about this in detail here. But put simply a libertarian sees minimal state intervention as a necessary evil. An anarchist sees the state as an unnecessary evil. This really is basic political theory. And to conflate a refusal to support the right of the state to execute innocent people with anarchism is a crude and ultimately unconvincing rhetorical position.

But that’s enough on Garry and the death penalty. It should be clear where Garry and I stand with regard to this issue, and I personally have better things to do moving forward than rehashing the arguments in my posts on the death penalty thus far. The death penalty is wrong and any attempts to bring it back should be rigorously fought.

Nearly missed this one from Guido Fawkes on the early release of one of Baby P's killers:

Two years after being convicted Jason Owen is back on the streets free. You can sign the e-petition to restore the death penalty here.

By all means sign the petition, but bear in mind it wouldn't have made a blind bit of fucking difference here as Owen was not convicted of murder and therefore wouldn't have been eligible for the noose. But let's not get too hung up on the facts - especially if they get in the way of a bit of rabble rousing...

(Failing to) Defend the Death Penalty

Over at Anna Raccoon's place, a chap called James Garry has come up with a well-written piece defending the death penalty. However, I don't find it convincing and in order to show why, it is probably most effective to look at the final four paragraphs:

The converse is also true: If you do not use the death penalty to deter crime, then you run the very real risk that innocent people will die in the future because their murderer has no real fear of the consequences of his crime. It cuts both ways.

There are a couple of problems with this. Firstly, it is possible for a potential murderer to fear the consequences of his (or her - women kill too, you know) action without the threat of the noose. I know there is this myth that prison is some sort of holiday camp and while some prisoners have privileges that might seem undeserved, prison is still that - prison. It is being denied your freedom and being incarcerated in close proximity to other prisoners, the vast majority of who will be unpleasant individuals at the very least. Death is not the only deterrent - a lengthy prison sentence would probably deter many.

But then again (and this is the second problem) there is the very real question of whether those who commit crimes are truly thinking of the consequences - in part because those consequences only become applicable if that person is caught. This then leads to the question of just how many criminals - murderers or otherwise - actually believe they will be caught before they commit their crimes. And it is no good pointing to those criminals who have been caught who now talk about consequences - those consequences will, no doubt, have become very real to them since their capture. No doubt the response to this is the idea that if just one murderer is deterred by the threat of the death penalty that it is worth it. More on this later.

As much as the anti-capital punishment brigade might not like it, supporters of the death penalty are wholly capable of dispassionate, rational thinking about the death penalty. I expect most supporters of the death penalty, similarly to me, want the death penalty reinstituted because of its success as a deterrent. We do not salivate at the prospect of the noose. Instead, I think we look a little further into the future than our opponents do.

I don't doubt that there are some supporters of the death penalty who are simply interested in its capacities as a deterrent - although whether they constitute "most" of them is disputable. But there are definitely some who salivate at "the prospect of the noose". Still, all this is conjecture; I don't know about the psychological make-up and reasoning of all those who support the death penalty, and nor does Garry. I would suggest, though, that "dispassionate, rational thinking" is of essential yet limited use when it comes to considering the death penalty. The use of empathy is also important when it comes to understanding what it would be like to feel the ultimate sanction of the state for a crime you are wholly innocent of. Far too often I see the case for the death penalty presented presented in utlitarian terms - that it is ok to execute a few innocent people if a greater number of people are saved. I find such ideas - which effectively amount to the sacrifice by the state of some citizens for the greater good - deeply troubling at best, and morally repugnant at worst.

Looking into the future we see the face of an innocent girl who has not yet been murdered. We conclude that if the threat of the death penalty could prevent her killer from killing her, then it is essential that we have a death penalty.

We could also look into the future and see the innocent misfit in the condemned cell, facing their last night on this planet before the heavy hand of the state snaps their neck for a crime they didn't commit. But let's not get too emotional here; let's actually look at an example of a child killer and ask whether the death penalty would have deterred them.

Ian Brady is often mentioned when people advocate the death penalty, and rightly so. Brady is a repellent human being - an immoral, sadistic child killer. If you want to make the case for hanging child killers, then Brady is a good place to start. And if the death penalty would have deterred Brady from killing, then it would be worth it, surely? If the threat of execution was enough to stop Brady from killing five young people, it has to be worth it, right?

Except that Brady was arrested on 7th October, 1965 - just over a month before the death penalty was abolished. In other words, all of Brady's crimes were committed when the death penalty was in place. Indeed, his most notorious crime (the horrific murder of five year old Lesley Ann Downey) was committed on 26th December, 1964 - nearly a year before the death penalty was abolished and also nearly a year before the last death sentence was handed down. I know the 1957 Homicide Act reduced the applications of the death penalty, but Brady would still have been eligible for the rope from the moment he killed his second victim. Did the death penalty deter Brady? Doesn't look like it. So if we look to the past, and that poor little girl walking into the clutches of the Moors Murderers on Boxing Day 1964 we see an example of the death penalty being, well, not really a deterrent. And that's before you consider the fact that Brady wants to die.

If you are concerned with protecting the innocent and the gentle and the law-abiding, you ought to support the death penalty.

Oh, please. To support the innocent, gentle and lawabiding we need to back the state murdering its own citizens? Self-defeating nonsense.

And I want to repeat myself - there is something deeply wrong with the idea that we should empower the state to take the lives of its citizens. The fact that the state already has this power (through such things as denying cancer sufferers the drugs that could save them, for example) doesn't then make it ok - in fact it simply further makes the case that we should be restricting the power of the state rather than increasing it. And owing to the general incompetence of the state and the fallibility of the humans who constitute it, we need to be very careful before we return to that state the power to take the lives of its citizens in a ritualistic manner for the greater good.

A Moral Case Against The Death Penalty

Over at the Telegraph, we learn that the death penalty "works". We also get a wonderful attempt to demolish the arguments of opponents of the death penalty through a striking example of hysterical (and largely empty) rhetoric:

We can expect anti-death penalty campaigners to point to America as an example of why it should stay banned. The usual images will be invoked of pot-bellied, racist, white judges sentencing innocent saints to death by chainsaw in some Alabama charnel house. Accepting the many obvious injustices in the US legal system, there is an instinctive British snobbery towards Americans that renders any comparison between our two countries unflattering. Amnesty International, Liberty and the New Statesman will probably ask, “Why would we endorse a system of retribution practiced by those knuckle-dragging, Bible bashing, toothless crazies over in Texas?”

Well, while some may use such imagery in their arguments against the death penalty, you won't find it coming from a death penalty opponent such as my good self. I don't care what the examples of the US - and of other more authoritarian (Iran, China) and totalitarian (North Korea)regimes - show us. Because my opposition to the death penalty is far simpler, and doesn't rely on statistics showing how ineffective it is. My position is this: the death penalty is morally wrong.

I don't believe the state should be able to take the lives of its citizens. I don't believe it makes sense. To claim that a crime - such as murder - is so wrong that the only way to combat it is to take a life doesn't fit together for me. Such arguments justify state murder using murder. But if murder is wrong, then why should the state be empowered to commit such a crime?

Of course, what the current campaign is actually advocating is the death penalty in certain cases - when the victim is a child or a police officer killed in the line of duty. Surely I'm not defending a person as vile as a child or cop killer? Well, no, of course I'm not - I believe that those people should be locked up for life. But to say those crimes are so heinous that the perpetrators deserve to lose their lives - or have their lives taken by the state - actually tells us something quite interesting about how we view individual worth. Put simply, the life of a serving police officer or a child is worth more than mine in the case of murder. And I struggle with that. It alludes to a mindset where we do not exist as individuals, but rather as amorphous blobs; of collective categories rather than individual humans. And I also worry about what the death penalty says about our relationship with the state; there can be few better ways of showing that the state is more important than the individual than through empowering it to end the existence of individuals in certain circumstances.

Then there's the problem of the fallibility of humanity. Humans fail; through incompetence and malice. That's why we have murderers in the first place. But the state - any state - is the construction of humans. Therefore, it too will be fallible. Yeah, I'm about to trot out the line about innocent people being sent to the gallows. But it is so often used in these debates because it is absolutely crucial to the nature of the death penalty. Any proponent of the death penalty needs to use their powers of empathy to put themselves in the shoes of a person wrongly accused of child or cop killing in the condemned cells facing the last night of their life before the state takes their very existence from them. There are no certainties in this life; we could all end up the victim of a miscarriage of justice. But I know for many of those arguing for the death penalty it seems highly unlikely that they would end up facing the ultimate sanction. As the examples of Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans shows, it is often the mentally slower people who end up as innocents on death row. Or, to use two examples of those who have more recently suffered miscarriages of justice and would have ended up facing death under Guido's proposed law, those who have stood out as in some way strange - Sally Clark with her post-natal depression or Stefan Kiszko, whose main crime seems to actually have been being an awkward mummy's boy. So those who are prepared to take a risk and allow for state murder are falling into the same trap as those who argue some victims are more important than others - they are stating that the lives of some are more important than others. They are effectively saying that the lives of the non-conformist, of the mentally ill or of the mentally subnormal are worth risking if we can string up a genuinely guilty child or cop killer. And I find such valuations of individual lives as morally questionable at best, and morally repugnant at worst.

So those who oppose the death penalty don't use to use anti-American cliches to make their case. Even if there was conclusive evidence using a simple utlitarian calculation that the death penalty works there would still be a moral argument to be made and one that needs to be effectively answered before we revert to the noose or embrace the needle.

Guido's Death Penalty Campaign*

I seriously think that Kelvin McKenzie should take some sort of legal action against Guido Fawkes (or whoever is running that site these days) for identity theft. Because with this sort of rabble rousing, he is truly gunning to the online version of perhaps The Sun's most notorious famous editor. Yes, he is/they are launching a petition to bring back the death penalty for child and cop murderers.

The logic, such as it is, seems to be that this should be done because a majority of the population back such a move. The evidence offered is scant, and "all polls" actually refers to just one poll, of 2,011 people, dating back to December 2008, in which 50% of the people (so just over 1,000, then) were for the death penalty. It is difficult to take such a result and project it with any degree of credibility across a population of over 60,000,000. And even if you could, would that then make it right for the majority to force their opinions on the minority? What the majority decided that pseudonyms should be banned from the internet? Or, more controversially and seriously, if Catholics should be declared second-rate citizens?

And while we're on the subject or spurious logic and borderline misrepresentation of the facts, what about the guff about "getting real justice" for the next Baby P? Those involved in the foul abuse of Baby P were not convicted of murder, and therefore would not have been eligible for the death penalty. This is nothing other dog-whistle politics - an attempt to gain support by mentioning the most infamous recent case of a malicious child death. Presumably Ian Huntley and Roy Whiting - two people who even to your humble author, a passionate opponent of the death penalty, can see the case for executing - are just too old hat these days.

Guido has done some good work in the past (McBride, Hain) and may yet continue to do so (Morgan), but this sort of thing does him no favours. It also does damage to the blogging world, since one of the few possible USPs that exists for political bloggers is that they are not like the MSM. Guido turning his site into not just a tabloid but one of the worst of the tabloids as well as one currently having its reputation justly dragged through the mud is a a depressing sign that, when (pseudo-)fame and (presumably) money come calling, the temptation to sell out is too much to resist.

I've no idea whether this idea/campaign has legs or will simply die a death. But I do sincerely hope for the latter, since the whole thing reeks of a cynical and desperate attempt to court public approval and precious little else.

*Yup, this post is largely a rehash of an earlier one. But since Guido has not really moved on in his opinons and logic this sort of post, by its very nature, can't move on that much either.

Guido Fawkes and the Death Penalty

The news of the conviction of Levi Bellfield for yet another appalling crime inevitably leads some to call for the reinstatement of the death penalty. And the Guido Fawkes website continues its shameless drift towards being the blogging version of The Sun with this sort of rabble rousing tripe:

The political class complains that the public is disengaged, could that be in part because there are a number of issues where the political class refuses to carry out the wishes of the people. All polls since 1965 when hanging was abolished show that there is majority support for capital punishment, yet there is no majority for it in parliament. It is not even an issue for parliamentarians even though the incidence of homicide is higher now than it was before the abolition of hanging. The coalition has promised that there will be e-petitions legislation before the end of this year. If it passes Guido will put all the resources at his command into a campaign for a vote on the restoration of capital punishment for child and cop killers. Even if we don’t win the vote on the floor of the House, we shall at least see which MPs believe salus populi suprema est lex, and those that put the welfare of child killers above the wider community. Bring it on…

Yes, because polls have never been wrong at all, have they? But let's take a look at what the writer at Fawkes' place actually claims. There is no evidence offered that "all polls since 1965" have shown a majority support for capital punishment - instead it links to a poll at this site, which shows the results of one poll from 2008 where 50% favour capital punishment, 40% don't, and 11% don't know. Yes, that's right - the poll adds up to 101%. Perfect.

But even if the polling data wasn't deeply suspect and in no real way supportive of what the site is trying to say, then there is still the really rather major problem of whether just because the majority supports something, does that then make it right? What if the majority called for the banning of homosexuality? The death penalty for drug users? Second class citizenship for, say, Catholics? Would that then make it right? Not, of course it fucking wouldn't. But that's what happens when you use the logic of The Sun; your case is simplistic and designed not to appeal to individual intellect, but to the unthinking mob.

And on the death penalty itself, I can't support it. I understand the thirst for revenge, particularly when dealing with such a spectacularly vile creature as Levi Bellfield, and particularly when that thirst comes from the bereaved. But revenge is seldom the best motivator for a supposedly dispassionate and neutral justice system, and revenge is not always applied to the guilty. In short, I can't really disagree with anything Longrider says on the death penalty here. There may be an intelligent case to be made for the death penalty; it certainly won't be made at the Guido Fawkes website.

String 'em all up...

...Or so say 99% of you, according to The Sun. Of course, they don't quite reveal exactly who they are talking about. They don't spell out who you is.

There is an online vote; it doesn't show you the results. Judging by the comments on their debate, more than the tiny figure of 1% oppose the death penalty, despite the awful killers convicted over the past few days. And some of The Sun writers (over 50% of those quoted!) oppose the death penalty as well, at least for this type of killer. The closest we get to actually defining who the "you" is that The Sun refers to is in the phrase "Sun readers".

And I can believe that. I can believe that 99% of The Sun readers want to see hanging brought back. And no, this is not just a typical "diss The Sun readers" rant. Because I can understand where The Sun readers are coming from. The crimes of Wright, Dixie and now Bellfield are utterly awful, and part of me wants to shout "hang the fuckers!" from the very top of my voice. But the other reason why I am not surprised that the vote came out at 99% is the media itself.

The response to the convictions of Wright, Dixie and Bellfield has been little short of hysterical. It is time for a reality check. First of all, all of these people are now in prison and, although Bellfield has yet to be sentenced at the time of writing, very unlikely to be freed any time soon. They were a threat, they aren't any longer. I'd be surprised if any of these people was ever released from prison - I certainly hope they won't be.

Also, each of these terrible individuals seems to have acted on some sort of demented psychological impulse. They were all cunning, clever, psychopaths. The death penalty would not have stopped them. I'd be surprised if anything actually stopped these sexual predators.

And let's get some perspective on these murders. Only one of these killers can technically be described as a serial killer - Wright. Only he has been convicted of killing three or more people. Bellfield killed two, Dixie just one. And whilst each and everyone of these evil fuckers may end up in court charged with more murders, at the moment, their combined death toll is just eight. Which (as awful as their crimes may be) is next to nothing in a population of over 60 million.

Which leads me to my final point; yes, this trio might have killed more people. But they have yet to be convicted of anything other than those eight murders - five of which you can attribute to the same person. Killers they may be, but they are still innocent until proven guilty. And the last thing we want is a Lucas Report style approach in this country. "Oh, yeah, he killed someone. Let's see what else we can pin on the fucker."

Ultimately, if you take these crimes individually, then they are terrible, heinous crimes, but rare acts here in the UK. The reason why they seem to be far more terrifying and concerning than they are - as well as the impact of the media coverage - is that the trials all ended at a similar point. Had these people been convicted at varying times, then the impact of the convictions would have been much diminished. Since they all seem to have been sent down at the same time, it all appears far worse and far more terrifying than it actually is. The end of the trials comes as a result of a quirk of the judicial calendar - and the last thing we want to be doing is making policy that will decide whether people live or die based on any such quirk.

NB: I'm against the death penalty, if you haven't already picked up on that. For a full explanation, see here.

The Death Penalty

The widow of Garry Newlove, the man kicked to death by a group of teenagers, has spoken out about her loss. And about the need for the restitution of the death penalty.

Now, let’s be very clear on this. Gary’s murder was a horrific crime. Those who committed it are evil, inhuman little turds who have rightly been imprisoned. And let us hope that their sentences are long, and each and every day is painful, unpleasant, and undignified. Because those little fuckers absolutely deserve it. Every moment of it.

However, this crime – and any other heinous murder – does not make the case for the death penalty. Quite simply, the state does not have the right to take the life of anyone. I don’t doubt that this is a controversial statement, and there will be a multitude of people who disagree with me, but I cannot see any case where the state should be able to kill. And nothing in what Mrs Newlove says changes that opinion.

She says:

"We need to think about the death penalty because it's the only way these kids are going to wake up to the pain they are causing."

Will the death penalty actually do that? This is close to the argument that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to those that will kill. The problem is that is incorrect. People still kill. The US is a great example: it has had the death penalty for years, and still people murder. Either because they do not think they will be caught and sentenced to death, or they just plain don’t care.

And the death penalty won’t make kids wake up to the pain they are causing. It might make them afraid of the consequences of their actions, but as I’ve noted above, there is no guarantee of that. However these kids are still going to be ignorant, unfeeling, evil little shits on occasion – death penalty or no death penalty. Particularly if they are under the influence of alcohol. The Tory proposals about enforcing the drinking laws make more sense here.

"Make no mistake, if the liberals running our justice system ever let these three out, they will kill again. They are ticking time bombs."

Well, if they are a threat to others, they shouldn’t be released. Ever. To me, a life sentence should mean life if need be. That these kids serve the rest of their lives in prison, if need be, to make others safe. And in some respects a life in prison might be worse than the death penalty.

"If we had the electric chair like in America, I'd watch them fry without the slightest feeling of sympathy."

Oh, absolutely. I don’t doubt that Helen Newlove would watch the little bastards fry. And don’t deny it, you’d feel the same way too. If it was your loved one, your parents, your siblings, your family, your friends. You’d want to see their killers die. Hell, I’ll bet you’d want to throw the lever yourself. Don’t deny it – with all the grief, loss, and rage left by an unthinking, brutal murder of someone you love, wouldn’t you want (even for the briefest moment) them to die? There is nothing wrong in Helen Newlove’s reaction. In fact, it is perfectly natural.

Which is precisely why we shouldn’t let the opinions of those who have suffered such a horrific loss decide the policies of this country. Those who are dealing with a terrible bereavement are not in the right, rational and calm frame of mind to weigh up all the ins and outs of this issue. Grief, rage and revenge are poor guides when you are considering national policies. The fact that Mrs Newlove lost her husband in a horrific manner does not automatically make her views on the death penalty correct. Just as the murder of Sarah Payne does not make the views of her mother on the law correct.

The death penalty is wrong. It is not a deterrent, and you run the risk of the state murdering an innocent person. But above all, the very last thing we want to do is give the power hungry state even more power over the citizens. And particularly not the legal power of life and death.

90 - Sorry, 200 - lashes for being raped

A story from our allies, Saudi Arabia, whose Royal Family were recently honoured (in idiosyncratic style) by our Royal Family:

"According to the Arab News newspaper, the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago."

A terrible story, but one that is not unique to the Middle East. Gang-rape can, and does, happen everywhere. And it looks like the rapists were brought to justice:

"Seven men from the majority Sunni community were found guilty of the rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from just under a year to five years."

A year to five years strikes me as a little light for the crime of gang rape, not least because the crime can carry the death penalty in that country. But, hey ho, I’m sure the judges know best.
Ah, wait, not they don’t:

"But the victim was also punished for violating Saudi Arabia's laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man."

The victim was sentenced to 90 lashes. That’s the victim. And her crime? Being in the car of a strange man. Jesus, it is just as well that this particular law isn’t applicable in the UK. Otherwise there would be mass floggings every Sunday morning.

"On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence."

Well, I’ll bet that the rape victim is really happy with the outcome of that appeal then.

I know that you should obey the law of your country, and I know that if you don’t, you should accept the punishment if you are caught. But it is a bit difficult to escape from the pungent air of misogyny that surrounds a law that sees a rape victim sentenced to 90 lashes. And then, on appeal, having those lashes more than doubled. With a six month prison sentence stuck on top.

And these people are our allies.

You could argue that, given my decadent Western ways, I can’t understand where this ruling is coming from. And you know what, you’d be right. Because I find the idea of lashing and jailing a person who was raped 14 times utterly abhorrent.

Still, it could have been worse. The victim could have been raped in Iran, where the penalty is far harsher.