Death penalty in a civil world

By Kevin Cavanagh
The Hamilton Spectator
(Jan 4, 2007)

The circus of taunts and jostling that erupted around Saddam Hussein as he stood there in Baghdad with a noose around his neck, waiting for the trap door to pop open, shows the kind of things that can go wrong when you're trying to kill someone.

The spectacle made the execution look more like a mob lynching than the delivery of a court's justice. It also gnawed at a lot of stomach muscles on every continent. For, even though millions of people in many countries would quickly agree that Saddam was a cold-blooded killer who needed to be silenced, a lot of those same folks believe that not even this celebrated villain should be slain through capital punishment.

When pollsters from AP/Ipsos last year asked the question in cities around the world, the United States was the only one of nine countries in which a majority of people wanted to see Saddam executed, rather than spend the rest of his days in prison. The study found 57 per cent of Americans preferred to see Saddam swing, compared with 38 per cent in Canada, the United Kingdom and France, 20 per cent in Italy and 14 per cent in Spain.

So, despite the near-universal contempt for a man who sent thousands of innocent people to harrowingly cruel deaths, a lot of citizens still make a clear distinction between an emotional desire to exterminate an icon of evil and the conscious decision to formally murder a murderer.

While Saddam is an unlikely poster child for any campaigns against capital punishment, his much-viewed demise came along at a time when Americans are doing some soul-searching over the ultimate sentence of their justice system.

The United States, often criticized for being the only member of the "civilized" G8 group of nations that keeps the death penalty, appears to be experiencing national unease over state-sanctioned killings. The latest evidence appeared two days ago, when New Jersey officials recommended that state abolish the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

It's a notion that is turning up around the country. Even though 38 U.S. states have death penalty statutes, a growing number of them have put a moratorium on executions. Just last month in Florida, then-governor Jeb Bush rushed to suspend the death penalty after people were horrified by a botched lethal injection that left a prisoner writhing and gurgling in front of witnesses.

The change in public attitude toward capital punishment has no doubt been assisted by the era of DNA evidence, exposing many wrongful convictions that would have otherwise never have been discovered.

Other hard facts have also offset the traditional argument that capital punishment is a deterrent. Here in Canada, for instance, the murder rate has gone down since Parliament abolished executions in 1976.

It's a debate that is always emotionally charged, especially when it happens in the wake of a gruesome crime. Any nation striving to protect true justice must keep a bead on how it defines civilized society. But in the case of capital punishment, is there any moral high ground at all?

Editorials are written by members of the editorial board. They represent the position of the newspaper, not necessarily the individual author.