(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.

The Cumbrian Murders

It is difficult to know what to say about the Cumbrian shootings. Such an appalling and senseless waste of human life - and those lives being taken in an arbitrary, pointless way as if to make it even worse - always provokes a response. And, sadly, that response is not limited to just those who want to offer condolences. Such brutal massacres become a way in which people can make their political points, and get into their pulpits and try to make everything alright again.

And you can see this happening in the aftermath of Bird's rampage. Some people want to ban shotguns, others want to prevent knee-jerk responses to the shooting, some want the death penalty restoring. But all miss the point that this story, at this point, should not about scoring political points. It should be about acknowledging the grief of those who have lost someone. Those who have a friend or a family member who won't ever be coming home again.

But that won't stop people making themselves and their opinions heard, and to some extent it is perfectly natural to want to do something in the aftermath of something like this. Opinions and strident calls for action represent a chance to reimpose order. But it is also pointless. Utterly pointless.

These things are arbitrary. They happen apparently at random. There's a man (and it does tend to be a man) who appears to be normal. Suddenly, that man is shooting. And by the time the emergency services start to realise what is going on, the perpetrator tends to be dead. They tend to have taken their own life. The span of the killing spree might be several hours, which sounds like a long time. But in reality, it is next to no time at all. The person starts to kill, they kill, then they are gone. The emergency services are only just starting to understand that there is something going on by the time that person is no more.

The death penalty is an irrelevance - as I mentioned, spree killers tend to kill themselves. Don't believe me? Think about Ryan. Hamilton. And now Bird. And while some American spree killers have gone down (for want of a better word) fighting, more recent examples show that suicide is increasingly the way in which these things end. And besides, America has had the death penalty for ages. It hasn't stopped people going on the rampage.

Those who argue that we should ban different types of firearms have more of a case. After all, those who go on the rampage with a knife tend to have fewer victims that those with a loaded gun. If they indulge in a spree killing, as opposed to a series of killings, that is. But ban the guns and you won't stop the youths with bombs strapped to their backs.

The reality - the terrifying reality that people struggle with, particularly after something like the Cumbrian spree - is that you can't stop the killers. There is something within humans that allows certain humans to commit crimes that shock the rest of the world. On a micro level, you have Derek Bird. On a macro level, you have Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and those who turned Rwanda in 1994 into a bloodstained killing field. One of the defining characteristics of humanity is the ability of some humans to be utterly inhuman to other humans. It is a terrifying thought - it is a terrifying reality - but for all the protests and platitudes that occur after this sort of thing has happened, nothing can change that this sort of thing is rare, yet seemingly inevitable.

So go on - argue your gun control, debate the death penalty. You won't stop humans being human - for better or, in the case of the horror in Cumbria, for worse.