Arguing To The Death

Having abandoned a civilised society's minimum requirements for conviction, we have to impose obscenely lax sentences even on the likes of this vile schoolboy murderer.

However, now that the debate on capital punishment, never mind the execution of a minor, has been opened, let it be joined in earnest. Abolition happened before the great 1970s miscarriages of justice had even occurred, still less been exposed; in any case, they could not happen now.

Far fewer countries have the death penalty than is generally supposed, and far more American States never use it, or do not even have it these days. It hardly happens in the US outside Texas. I defy those of you who support it to explain why you agree with a practice now most prevalent in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Cuba. Are those states of which you approve?

But the real point is this: the State has no more right to take a morally innocent human life (i.e., that of a wrongly convicted person) on the basis of mere judicial guilt than on the basis of, say, disability, or old age, or terminal illness, or still being in the womb.

So, when can we expect liberal America and the UN, which recently called for a moratorium on the death penalty by a margin far too large to be put down to mere Western cultural imperialism, to act against those evils, too?

Nor is it coherent for a country to have nuclear weapons (which likewise have absolutely no deterrent value, but that is not quite the present point) but not capital punishment. The solution to that incoherence is not the restoration or retention of capital punishment.