liathach

I'm reading Sister Helen Prejean's The Death of Innocents at present. Every page of this book shocks you to the core. How innocent men can be executed, trapped in a legal maze of pro-death rhetoric and political opportunism, that at times resembles Kafka's The Trial. Appeals turned down because of one wrongly typed word. DNA evidence rejected without examination. Witnesses disappeared, snitches recruited, juries manipulated. Evidence witheld from defence attorneys. After a while, it leaves you numb.

Of course, it's easy to oppose the death penalty when it comes to the wrongly convicted. Nobody wants to see an innocent person die. But I've opposed the whole concept of the death penalty for....well, my whole life it seems. I find it a morally repulsive solution to the problem of protecting society; the reason prosecutors usually give to jurors to persuade them to send someone to their death.

I have a whole host of reasons why I oppose it. But it all started with my Father. We have been diametrically opposed on political issues all my adult life. He is very much a conservative, so my socialism has always rubbed along rather poorly with his stance on various issues. But he has always opposed capital punishment as an acceptable judicial solution, and I inherited my opposition from him.

As I said, I have a host of reasons; most of which you could find in any book (the careerism of attorneys and judges tied to their pro-death stance is a potent one). But the one that seems most personal is that I believe when we execute someone we admit to our own failure. We have decided that, as a society, we are not capable of either rehabilitating that individual, or at least managing their lives so that both society and themselves are protected from their actions. We have been posed a complex question, and all we can offer is a simple answer. We are Pilate, washing our hands and walking away.

One additional argument that Prejean presents, that I have not come across before, is that, in order to support the death penalty, a country's citizens must give their government the right to kill them when it so chooses. I won't expand on that; just mull the implications over.

I don't have Prejean's faith. But I do share her belief in the UN Charter on Human Rights, that states that all human life is inviolable, and all humans, no matter how evil their deeds, have rights purely because they are human. A wry smile crossed my face when she mentioned that, in all the pro-life rhetoric the Catholic church is wont to indulge in (abortion, euthanasia, etc), the one pro-life issue they fudge is that of condemned criminals.

I'm lucky. I live in a country that does not execute its citizens. And the only debates we now have about extreme crimes is whether a life sentence should mean exactly that. Legal homicide (the cause of death cited on death certificates) is no longer an issue here. One of the key cases that decided it was of two youths, one armed, who were confronted by a police officer. When the officer asked the younger man to hand over the gun, the older youth shouted 'Let him have it!'. And the boy shot the officer dead. He was too young to be sentenced to hang. But the older youth wasn't. And on the basis of his shout, he was hung. But can anyone say what that call really meant?