Lee Anderson has changed my mind. I’ve always been an opponent of capital punishment but the Tory deputy chairman makes an irrefutable point: ‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed.’ I could make a number of objections. I could say the death penalty violates the sanctity of human life. I could say it is vulnerable to wrongful conviction and execution. I could say handing power over life and death to a state that locked us in our homes for two years and forced old and sick people to die alone is remarkably trusting, to say nothing of forgiving.
Instead of saying any of that, I’ll say this: fine, let’s bring back the death penalty. Sure, it would be incompatible with our obligations under Protocol 13 of the ECHR and with continued membership of the Council of Europe, but I doubt Anderson would greet withdrawal from either with particular horror. Once we’ve done that, we can pass a capital murder statute defining the circumstances under which the law permits or requires the death sentence and any aggravating and mitigating factors.
As to the method, I say we keep it traditional. Lethal drugs can be difficult and costly to obtain for intravenous injection. Execution by gas, whether hydrogen cyanide or nitrogen, carries risks to those administering the sentence. Shooting is a soldier’s death, not a criminal’s. Electrocution? At current energy prices? We’re not made of money, you know. No, a stout length of hemp will do.
This brings us to the question of who will carry out the hangings. There’s probably still a few Pierrepoints kicking around and maybe one can be convinced to return to the family trade. Of course, in these more enlightened times, we understand more fully the psychological toll of an execution on the executioner. The state has a duty of care to its staff and it cannot risk the harm a steady diet of executions might do to a man. Plus, a designated executioner would be the target of endless legal action and other harassment from anti-hanging activists seeking to disrupt executions.
Which is where my modest proposal comes in. Yes, you can have the death penalty back but on one condition: instead of a lead executioner, hangings will be carried out by randomly selected members of the public. Executioners would be drawn in the same way that jury members are today. Those with severe incapacities — i.e. people unable to pull the lever or to understand the moral consequences of doing so — would be excused, but every other adult would be liable to a summons for execution duty.
Technicians would be on hand to prepare the prisoner. The citizen executioner would be required only to activate the lever that springs open the trap door, sending the condemned into oblivion. The executioner would, however, see the prisoner’s face before the hood was placed over it and be witness to any last words. Execution service would be mandatory. Your GP couldn’t write a note to get you out of it. Fail to turn up or refuse to pull the lever and it’s a criminal offence carrying a mandatory custodial term of ten years. Like jury service, travel expenses would be covered and, also like jury service, you might be called up more than once.
Now, there are those who like to say, ‘I’d pull the lever myself’, and they might relish execution service as a jolly treat. But they wouldn’t get to pick and choose. They might turn up at the appointed prison only to learn they’re hanging that woman who was in the news for stabbing her husband in his sleep, the one who battered and brutalised her every day for years and threatened to kill the kids if she tried to leave. Or they might get the father who’s been all over the papers for taking a baseball bat to the ringleader of the grooming gang that got its hands on his little girl. She was still in primary school, wasn’t she?
Or maybe they’ll be staring through the noose at that armed police officer who shot and killed a drug dealer during a raid. He said he saw a gun but they never found one. Plus, he put a whole magazine into the guy. But with those old tweets the BBC found, and the local MP organising marches, and the new DPP having one eye on a political career, the poor chap was bound to swing for it.
Those would be exceptional cases, you might say. We need to bring back the rope for monsters like Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Huntley and Rose West. The ones that confess; the ones convicted on forensic evidence; the ones identified by CCTV. Stefan Kiszko confessed; Judith Ward was convicted on forensic evidence; William Mills was identified by CCTV. Which is why, if you want the death penalty back, you should have no hesitation in supporting my execution service proposal. If you have sufficient confidence in the criminal justice system to allow the imposition of the irrevocable sentence, you should have no trouble in carrying it out with your own two hands.
Only the guilty and the truly heinous are ever going to hang, so you wouldn’t have to worry that the bloke you dispatched to the next life might turn out to have been a Timothy Evans rather than a John Christie. This works, too, for utilitarian arguments about there being value in the noose overall, even if a few innocent men go to their deaths. It’s a reasonable point, and execution service gives you the chance to make it right there in the death chamber, not just down the pub or on Twitter or in an interview with The Spectator.
So let’s bring back the death penalty and let’s all of us have skin in the game. If you think that lever needs pulled, pull it yourself.
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