Should the Southport killer swing? Lee Anderson thinks so. The Reform MP posted an image of a noose on X, with the words: ‘No apologies here. This is what is required!’ It’s not the first time Anderson has backed the return of the rope, and not the first time I’ve contended that he’s wrong, but there’s something I want to say before getting into the nitty gritty. Wanting Axel Rudakubana dead is a thoroughly mainstream and entirely understandable view. Among those who have children, I would go further and suggest that it is the natural response. On capital punishment, as on so much else, liberals think of ourselves as cool-headed rationalists, above the hot tempers and base bloodlust of the mob, but it is perfectly rational to believe that a child-killer should be executed, and, while we’re at it, what is so wrong about feeling angry and vengeful over the murder of children? These are normal instincts.
Normal, but difficult to turn into norms. I am opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances, a position that emerges from Catholic teaching on ‘the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life’ and the principle that ‘not even a murderer loses his personal dignity’. But you can think there is a place for capital punishment on our statute books and still appreciate that Southport is the sort of case that makes for bad legislation. Those who would see Rudakubana hang point to the fact there is no doubt about his guilt: he admitted to the murders and even gloated about them in custody. Yet this is the very reason why it would be unwise to legislate a death penalty off the back of his crimes. The Southport murders were unlike most murders and a law drawn up with them in mind would extend to very different circumstances.
The campaign to abolish capital punishment was aided immeasurably by headline-grabbing causes celebre, such as Derek Bentley (hanged on the basis of joint enterprise) and Ruth Ellis (hanged for a crime of passion), but even a narrowly drawn death penalty statute could result in irreparable miscarriages of justice, rendering it vulnerable to public opinion and changing parliamentary arithmetic. A death penalty for child murder might satisfy justice in cases like Southport or the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, but it would also have seen Donna Anthony, Angela Cannings, and Sally Clark go to the gallows following wrongful conviction for murdering children who had in fact died from sudden infant death syndrome.
A more limited capital murder statute might restrict the death sentence to cases where the accused is convicted based on forensic evidence. Then again, Judith Ward was convicted of murder based on forensic evidence and spent 18 years inside until the Court of Appeal found the forensic evidence to have been hopelessly wrong. Yes, you might say, but forensic science has improved immeasurably since Ward’s conviction in 1974. It has, and yet between 1978 and 2024, 62 death row inmates in the United States have been exonerated on the grounds of ‘false or misleading forensic evidence’. Nor are forensics the only branch of evidence prone to human error. Consider the case of William Mills, sentenced to nine years for the armed robbery of a bank in Glasgow’s West End, on the strength of two police officers testifying that they had identified him from CCTV. The robber on the footage had his mouth covered by a scarf and his eyes by sunglasses. Mills was freed after a fresh investigation discovered evidence linking a convicted bank robber to the crime.
A narrower law still might require a confession to make a murderer eligible for a rendezvous with the modern Mr Pierrepoint. Such a law would have still meant execution for Stefan Kiszko, who spent 16 years in prison after confessing to the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. Kiszko’s conviction was later quashed and the real murderer eventually caught. The Kiszko case was particularly egregious: he had a mental age of seven, was allowed no solicitor, was falsely accused of exposing himself by four teenage girls who admitted they made it up ‘for a laugh’, and couldn’t have produced the DNA evidence left at the murder scene because he was impotent. Policing and criminal trials procedure have come a long way since then, but if we again look across the pond, we find 32 instances of death row inmates released on the basis of ‘false confession’.
Of course, you might be a ruthless utilitarian and reckon that stringing up a poor innocent bugger every now and then a price worth paying to exact retribution on the likes of Rudakubana. Still, you would have to contend with a British public that does not think in those terms. There is a reason miscarriage of justice stories have always shifted papers and made ratings hits of TV docudramas. Something deep in the British soul is horrified by the thought of the lone individual, falsely accused, at the mercy of the state, condemned to suffer a punishment they do not deserve. As long as this aspect of the British character remains, it wouldn’t matter if a thousand kid killers took a trip through the trapdoor: just one wrongfully hanged sod and the death sentence would soon be off to meet its Maker.
I think it foolhardy that anyone should want to give the state the power to kill its citizens
There are plenty of other considerations. Britain is no longer the same country it was when the last hangings were carried out in 1964. We are a multicultural society, one latterly steeped in American identity politics. It would not be long before the racial and ethnic composition of our condemned cells was pored over by solicitors and activists to level charges of racial bias. Barristers would urge juries to consider racial and other social justice factors to save their clients from the noose. And how many police officers would volunteer for armed duties knowing their lawful killing of a black or ethnic minority suspect could see them not only in the dock for murder but on trial for their life while rabble-rousing MPs, journalists and community leaders agitate for ‘justice’? I might be a hand-wringing liberal, but after the conduct of government and officialdom over the past decade, I think it foolhardy that anyone should want to give the state the power to kill its citizens and truly baffling that those clamouring the loudest for it are the very right-wingers most suspicious of the state’s intentions.
Its moral and ethical dimensions aside, the death penalty is too prone to error, too open to miscarriages of justice, and too vulnerable to sudden lurches in politics and public opinion to be a workable response to crimes like Southport. If the right wants to move the dial on penal policy, it should focus on how best to combine earlier intervention with an expansion in the use of custody and other forms of detention, with a particular emphasis on serious habitual offenders and those severally mentally ill people who demonstrate violent and aggressive tendencies. To achieve such a criminal justice revolution, and to insulate it from legal or policy challenge, the right would have to leave behind its basic boomer attitudes to incarceration, and all the various sadisms some reactionaries yearn to see visited upon offenders. To be a credible solution to violence and attended pathologies, an expanded prison estate would have to provide a safe, clean, healthy and productive environment for inmates. It wouldn’t be cheap. Lord knows it wouldn’t be popular. But it is a more viable answer than the death penalty.
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