As a torch-and-pitchfork populist it’s not a great surprise that Guido Fawkes is in favour of the death penalty. Nor will it be a great shock when he gathers the 100,000 signatures needed to petition parliament* to consider reintroducing capital punishment. And I agree with my old friend Neill Harvey-Smith who, while opposing the death penalty, ain’t afraid of discussing the issue even though, perhaps especially because, the polls consistently suggest a majority of voters would like to bring back hanging.
So be it. Nelson Jones makes an astute point: the abolitionist cause was fortunate in its timing. Not just because it was a product of a liberal era but also because the test case was the dreadful execution of Derek Bentley not the appalling crimes committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Had the Moors Murders been the poster-case for or against hanging the outcome might well have been very different.
Nevertheless, this will be an odd debate if only because it’s so familiar and so few minds are likely to be changed one way or the other. As it happens I don’t think MPs should be expected to follow or pander to the prejudices of their constituents (but if constituents wish to punish them for failing to do so then so be it). But nor do I think supporters of the death penalty will be swayed by arguments about the risk of executing the innocent. In my experience they’re happy to accept that risk as the price of doing business.
They are equally happy to ignore anything that confounds their suspicion that the death penalty must surely deter criminal behaviour. There does not seem to be much evidence showing that states that use capital punishment have lower murder rates than those that don’t. On the contrary, in America states that still execute prisoners tend to have higher murder rates than those that do not. (Evidently this does not suggest that abolishing capital punishment lowers murder either. There seems little causation at play here.) Texas has executed nearly five hundred people since 1976 but its murder rate remains much the same as California’s where, despite a large population on death row, few executions have actually been carried out in recent years.)
Overall, of course, there has been a sharp decline in American homicide in recent years but this has little to do with executing prisoners and is instead the product of a complex cocktail of social, demographic and policy trends and decisions. Indeed, the death penalty is in decline and now largely confined to Texas and a mere handful of other states even if it remains on the statute book in most states. (And even Texas is executing fewer people than it did in Governor George W Bush’s heyday.)
I am extremely reluctant to grant the state the power to execute citizens it holds in custody but suspect that while this is certainly a matter of ethics it’s also, in part, a question of aesthetics. That is, I cannot pretend to be too upset by the verdicts handed down at Nuremberg even if these too were the product of an unavoidably flawed, though well-intentioned, process. Similarly, had Osama bin Laden been apprehended and put on trial in the United States I doubt I’d have mustered much outrage had he been sentenced to death. (On which note: see Cranmer.)
But these are especially unusual cases even by the unusual standard of capital crimes and, being matters of war as well, unreliable guides to wise public policy as it must apply in the great majority of cases.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting that the issue is upon us once again. Part of the explanation is technological: the ease of petitioning government by email which has encouraged this government to offer at least the idea or temptation of openess on these matters. And part of it is, I suspect, another straw supporting the notion that the liberal era of the past 40 years is threatened by a new and resurgent populism that, like all such populist outbreaks, is inherently inimical to liberalism. The uncertainty of the economic climate fosters this (cf, the growing appeal of restrictions on the mobility of labour and capital) and so too does the idea, inchoate but real nevertheless, that the west has had its day and will be eclipsed by China and the east at some point in the coming century.
I have a little more faith in the British justice system than I do in its American counterparts but not so much that I’m happy to grant the state this kind of sanction. If I won’t trust the state to issue an ID card why should I trust it with the death penalty?
But regardless of matters of efficiency or deterrance the appeal and the horror of hanging is essentially a matter of emotion not reason even if those of us on the abolitionist side prefer to think, or perhaps pretend, we’re more reasonable than those who’d like to reintroduce the death penalty. We have our reasons but they have theirs too and in some sense it is the liberal abolitionist whose emotional response might be thought less immediately or instinctively human. I think that’s a good thing but that’s a minority view too.
*Technically a parliamentary committee that is not compelled to bring the issue before the house.
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