Niall Boylan asked me to come on his podcast yesterday morning to discuss, in the aftermath of the attacks in Southport which have claimed three children’s lives at the time of writing, the death penalty. Sadly, I was unable to take part.
Had I been available, I assume I’d have said what I always thought – that the death penalty is wrong for a dozen or so very good reasons.
It’s easy enough to stick with what you’ve always thought, especially when the arguments are pretty good. There are a range of problems with the death penalty not the least of which is that “the state” doesn’t execute anybody. There’s no disembodied entity pushing the button or pulling the trigger or flipping open the trapdoor – instead the state tasks some person with the job of becoming a cold-blooded killer of the defenceless condemned, which is a burden, I’d have argued, that should not be placed on any soul.
Further, though I’m not a very religious person, it seems to me that life is self-evidently sacred. We are each granted but one of them. There is no more final or irrevocable punishment than taking a life, and given the number of mistakes the state makes in basically every other field of its activity, empowering it to make irrevocable decisions about life or death has always seemed to me a mistake.
Finally, I am probably influenced by the entirely macabre and absurd spectacle that is US executions, where the process takes decades and has been sanitised to within an inch of its life to the extent that executions are a grotesque mockery of a medical procedure, where the condemned is strapped down and injected with drugs that will end his or her life in a way that’s supposed to look peaceful and relaxing for the benefit of squeamish spectators. Though I cannot imagine that watching lethal drugs meander their way down a tube towards your arm is a particularly peaceful or relaxing experience for the condemned themselves.
So, had Boylan managed to get me on air yesterday morning, I’d have said no, Niall. The death penalty is a bad idea.
I think now, on balance, that I might have been wrong.
What is, after all, the appropriate societal response to somebody who enters a room full of children and attacks them with a knife, killing three and leaving the rest with physical and emotional scars that may never heal? The UK police, at the time of writing, have not revealed a motive for the attack but this is the very definition of terrorism. Even actual confessed terrorists, like our own IRA, didn’t attack children deliberately – they may have recklessly killed a few in their time, most notably in Warrington, but even the most brutish IRA attacks didn’t directly attempt to kill children.
The problem for a society without the death penalty is that it is left with only the ordinary responses to an extraordinary crime. Let us assume for example that the perpetrator in this instance is condemned to spend every remaining day of his life in a maximum-security prison, never seeing the light of day again. That would put him in the company of some horrendous criminals, to be sure – including for example Thomas Mair, who murdered the MP Jo Cox in June 2016, and Marcus Osborne, who stabbed his ex girlfriend and her new lover to death in a horrific crime of jealous rage. Their sentences, to be clear, are just: They will never know freedom again.
But this latest attacker, it seems to me, is clearly in another category altogether. It seems readily apparent from the nature of his crime that his target was chosen deliberately – that he intended to kill children. It seems further apparent that this was a crime not against individuals because of who they were, but a direct attack on society itself, intended to shock and cause immense public distress. That the immense suffering of random parents was the point of his crime.
Society, I think, must have some response to that which differentiates and recognises the particular nature of the crimes involved.
Back in a darker age, when the death penalty was commonplace on these islands, there were various methods of execution. Alleged witches were burned, though commonly a merciful executioner would garotte them before the flames were lit. Common criminals were hanged. Only those guilty of the very worst crimes – in those days high treason – were condemned to the worst punishment of all; hanging, drawing, and quartering. There was a recognition, even in a society which killed liberally and tyrannically, that there remained an ultimate punishment.
In our enlightenment, we have decided as a society – Britain and Ireland and indeed Europe as a whole – that the very worst thing that can happen to a person who wrongs us is life in prison without parole. At the same time, prison – though by no means a hotel stay – has become a much more comfortable place than it was in centuries of yore. If convicted, the perpetrator in this case will have a life of access to books, and some television, and emails, and intellectual stimulation. Not to mention the satisfaction that a sick mind might derive from replaying his crimes and notoriety over and over again in his head.
There is a danger, of course, with bringing back the death penalty. That danger is that there is a real risk that the notion of which crimes warrant it would tend to inflate over time, and that a penalty you bring in for only the most heinous crimes starts getting applied to – for want of a better term – common or garden murders. Juries, I think, might be a little too keen to send people to the hangman, as might elements of the press. Give it to politicians, and you’ll end up with the Bill Clinton scenario, where Clinton took time off his 1992 campaign to highlight his toughness on crime by overseeing the death of a man so mentally deficient that he left the dessert from his last meal to “eat later”. I think the best way to differentiate these crimes is to treat them as different crimes. Rather than being charged with murder, a fellow like this should be charged with the separate offence of a crime against society, or something of that nature. Leave it up to prosecutors to decide which crimes merit the charge.
And if found guilty, he should be executed. Swiftly, and in public, and at the end of a short rope. Not as an act of vengeance, but as a way of noting that some crimes – only some – are so uniquely heinous that they require nothing less than the ultimate punishment.