The execution of Saddam Hussein last month followed by the even more gruesome execution of his half brother has sparked off a heated debate in my post bag about capital punishment, something that hasn’t happened since the Soham murders almost five years ago. For my own part, I can’t lose any sleep for Saddam: he had it coming. However uncomfortable his execution might have been it was as nothing to those of his own victims tortured with the most ghastly of deaths.
I remain of the view that the death penalty is a just punishment for dreadful crimes, be they pre meditated murder or deliberately inflicting grievous injuries. Though it may be just it doesn’t necessarily make it expedient. Although I have twice voted for the death penalty, I am not necessarily persuaded that I would do so on a third occasion. What has put me off is not any doubt about the justice of the penalty but rather the grisly nature of the whole business. There is something profoundly macabre about the process. The ghoulish onlookers physically present or via the television camera demean themselves by witnessing such a frightful spectacle. There is something profoundly unpleasant about people’s fascination with the subject and their eagerness to witness it. This gives rise to a difficult point of principle: if I am unwilling to witness the process of execution, or allow others to do so, is it intellectually honest to vote for it?
What has taken place in Iraq has been a salutary reminder of the gruesome nature of capital punishment. If we are revolted by the scenes from Iraq, then it is as nothing to the routine and very public executions that take place in Iran where they are masters of the “short drop” so that the spectators can watch the victims kicking and struggling as they strangle to death. In China, although the victim is shot in the back of the head, they are first publicly paraded before large crowds to be humiliated.
The most persuasive argument, however, is not so much the grisly unpleasantness of execution so much as the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Last year, a constituent came to see me at my weekly surgery who had been convicted and imprisoned for a particularly vicious murder. Had the death penalty been available he would have undoubtedly been a victim of it and he would not have been alive to savour justice when new evidence emerged which led to his conviction being quashed. How can I square this circle? If I accept the death penalty as in principle just, yet I am disgusted by the gruesome brutality of execution and fearful of a miscarriage of justice, what is the way out? Actually, I think there is a perfectly sensible one. The public demand that justice should be done could well be satisfied by life imprisonment actually meaning for “life”. What is so infuriating is that the public well know that even with the trial judge gives a sentence of life imprisonment, the reality will be very different for all but the tiniest number of offenders. The public really has to be confident that violent criminals guilty of the most heinous crimes will be incarcerated forever and that the circumstances of that incarceration will suit their crime (penal servitude with hard labour would do nicely). Only then will the demand for capital punishment be assuaged.
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