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.

On Nuclear Power

This article is typical of a lot of the commentary I've read about the potential meltdown at Fukushima. Apparently, the ongoing incident is a damning indictment at best, or death knell at worst, of the nuclear power industry. My problem with this idea is that I can't quite figure out why this should be the case.

Let's do a quick recap. A massive earthquake - followed by a massive tsunami - hits Japan. It is the biggest earthquake Japan has faced in recorded history. Entire settlements - including towns - are wiped out in the sort of disaster that could be described as biblical. It is an utterly appalling calamity. And a nuclear station is hit by a series of explosions. And - crucially - said nuclear power station does not go into meltdown.

Of course, there has been a concerted effort to minimise the damage caused by the impact of the disaster on Fukushima, and there are no guarantees of a calamity occurring there tomorrow. But honest to God that nuclear power station did pretty well in the face of a devastating disaster.

Yet, somehow, this is meant to be some sort of damning indictment of the nuclear industry, and a clear indication of why more nuclear power stations would be a bad idea. Why, I might hear you ask?

I think part of the reason is that there is still a tendency to conflate nuclear power with nuclear bombs. Now, I can understand the fear of nuclear bombs - hell, I'm as afraid of weapons of massive destruction as the next person - but nuclear power is not the same as nuclear weaponry. Unless the petrol that goes in your car is the same as the petrol that goes in a molotov cocktail. The crucial point is in the intent - a petrol bomb, like a nuclear bomb, is meant to destroy. A petrol powered engine, like a nuclear reactor, is not meant to destroy. So guess what happens? Those who design such power sources create them so they are designed to minimise the destruction caused if something goes wrong. Which is why Fukushima is still there, even if the impact of the shattering natural disaster that occurred just over a week ago has been pretty devastating for much of eastern Japan.

As the human race moves forward, we need to find ways in which we can generate power without using oil. To turn our backs on nuclear power based on what is, at the time of writing and with a sense of perspective on the wider situation, a non-disaster, is counter-intuitive to say the least. There will be things that can be learned from the Fukushima incident - for example, to design power stations that can withstand massive earthquakes if they are in areas where such earthquakes occur, which Fukushima was apparently not designed to withstand.

As crude, unpleasant and harsh as it may sound at this moment, when the death tallies are collated, the incident at Fukushima will pale into insignificance next to the destruction wrought by Mother Earth and its earthquake and subsequent tsunami. So to dismiss nuclear power based on a largely unprecented earthquake seems foolish at best, and to completely miss the point of this disaster at worst.

*And I say this with friends in Japan right now.