death penalty news July 23, 2004
SOUTH KOREA: Should We Execute Serial Killers? - Korea's worst serial murderer has capital punishment on the lips of many "Among the experts, there is overwhelming consensus that the death penalty never has been, is not and never could be a deterrent to homicide over and above long imprisonment, . . .The rates of consensus were much higher on this question than I ever thought possible. We never see 90 percent of criminologists agree on anything." -- Michael Radelet, chairman of the University of Florida's sociology department and a longtime researcher of death penalty issues. The recent capture of a Korean serial killer in Seoul has left the public pondering whether the death penalty should be maintained and has left the police force wondering how they can fix their blundering Keystone Cops (1920s series that featured well-meaning but blundering idiots as police) type antics. Proponents of the death penalty argue that the death penalty should be maintained because it deters crime, a valid justification for the death penalty is retribution, and the death penalty is the only adequate retributive punishment for murder. Opponents of the death penalty dispel the argument that the death penalty deters crime and argue that retribution is not a valid theory of punishment or the death penalty is not a valid retributive choice. The conception that the death penalty deters crime and the retributive justification for the death penalty has been debated in the U.S. decades before the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case of Furman v. Georgia that ruled that the death penalty laws of 39 states were unconstitutional. This ruling stated that the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" under the existing form of state statutes. In Gregg v. Georgia (1976), after many state statutes were amended, the Supreme Court held that state death penalty laws could be constitutional if these laws provided "clear and objective standards." Since, the Gregg case 38 out of the 50 states, the federal government, and the military have death penalty legislation that complies with the Supreme Court standard. The Korean Constitutional Court also upheld a death penalty law in the case of 95HunBa1 (1996). The only likelihood of the death penalty being repealed in the U.S. and Korea is through legislation. It seems little chance exists for a court to rule that the death penalty is unconstitutional. So the debate goes on in the halls of our legislatures, our pubs and forums on our Web pages. Many in the debate contend that the death penalty deters crime and they often cite studies. The most noted studies, however, appear to show the converse. Most studies show that the death penalty doesn't deter crime. For example, John Sorenson, and his team, examined executions in Texas between 1984 and 1997. They speculated that if a deterrent effect existed, it would be found in Texas because of the high number of death sentences and executions within the state. Using patterns in executions across the study period and the relatively steady rate of murders in Texas, the authors found no evidence of a deterrent effect. The study concluded that the number of executions was unrelated to murder rates in general, and that the number of executions was unrelated to felony rates. (45 Crime and Delinquency 481-93 (1999)). Another noted study by Keith Harries and Derral Cheatwood studied differences in homicides and violent crime in 293 pairs of counties. Counties were matched in pairs based on geographic location, regional context, historical development, demographic, and economic variables. The paired counties shared a contiguous border, but differed on use of capital punishment. The authors found no support for a deterrent effect of capital punishment at the county level comparing matched counties inside and outside states with capital punishment, with and without a death row population, and with and without executions. (Rowman and Littlefiled Publishers, Lanham, MD (1997)) The studies that purport to show that the death penalty does deter crime usually show a modest decrease in crime, but the studies usually don't use raw data, but extrapolate a theory from surveying prisoners and non-prisoners. Many of those that are proponents of the death penalty -- knowing that the research is not always consistent -- argue as does John McAdams of the Marquette University department of political science that "[i]f we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call." McAdams' argument is at least somewhat compelling. The real argument, however, doesn't come down to the deterrent effect of the death penalty, since the research on both sides is inconclusive at best. The real argument comes down to whether retribution is a valid reason to execute a murderer. This answer I will leave to the reader. (source: OhmyNews) ===================== UNITED KINGDOM: Death is the right price When I heard the statement made by the parents of the murdered twin sisters Diane and Claire Sanderson - "words cannot express how we feel about the sudden and unexplained deaths of our two beautiful daughters" - for a moment I wished, passionately, that the death penalty could still be invoked for such an appalling murder. I felt the same about the killing of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham. Capital punishment is despised by many, and those who defend it are condemned as barbarians, but how else can we express, symbolically and metaphorically, as well as materially, the notion that it is a very great evil to brutally extinguish the lives of two 27-year-old sisters? I am not sure, as things are, that people do always understand, any longer, just how terrible a deed such a murder is. It seems to me a lot of people never did get the point of Soham - I have even heard the public grief expressed over these deaths described as "moral panic". Murder has been rendered, in the French expression, banalis? - morally reduced to the banal. The point is not sufficiently taken that a killer is not only extinguishing a life - twin lives, here, which have also been linked with another double murder of an elderly couple - but the future of a family: the promise of continuity, happiness and fulfilment and, in the natural order of things, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The role of the death penalty is not, inherently, its deterrent aspect: that has never been proved. Its more powerful role is its message. Here is something awesome, which dramatises and amplifies the idea that in some particularly heinous murders, only the forfeit of the killer's own life can pay the tariff for the crime. Yes, there are many good objections to capital punishment: that it is unacceptable for the state to take life (though the state does take life, and sometimes quite lightly, in war, as we have recently seen). And - more compellingly - that a mistake can be made, and an innocent person executed. In the last two most celebrated cases of the 1950s, that of the teenager Derek Bentley, hanged in 1953, and of Ruth Ellis, hanged in 1955, both were verdicts later judged too harsh. In a review of the Bentley case 50 years later, the judge, Lord Goddard, was described as "frankly prejudiced": Bentley had a mental age of 11. Ellis, as was widely argued at the time, would have walked free from a continental court, on the plea that hers was crime of passion. These cases were extremely influential in the campaigns for abolition, and understandably so: there was too much public disquiet about them. In both cases, the home secretary should have commuted the penalty to a custodial sentence. Unfortunately, home secretaries often made such decisions on political grounds, rather than weighing the merits objectively. When I was researching the life of Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, I asked the late Roy Jenkins why the home secretary in 1945, James Chuter Ede, had not commuted the Joyce verdict, since it was even then controversial. Lord Jenkins told me that politicians often made such decisions according to whether they wanted to look tough and strong, or generous and liberal. That is, their own image was often more germane to the decision than objective justice. (There was also a draconian civil servant at the Home Office, Sir Frank Newsome, who cropped up in the Joyce and Ellis cases, guiding the minister not to show any weakness.) Thus the case for the death penalty was weakened by bad judges and self-serving politicians. Individuals were executed who should not have been. But there is a case, I still believe, for the death penalty: very conservatively exercised, very seldom used, and even, if you like, usually rescinded, at the steps of the gallows itself. Yet the very existence of those gallows underlines an idea we must not allow to become "banalised": that murder, deliberately carried out, is a heinous crime. There is little chance of the death penalty ever being restored, or even debated: apart from anything else, the EU would not permit it. It has been abolished now everywhere in Europe - with Portugal carrying out its last execution in 1849, and France sending the last man to the guillotine in 1977. There is also a spiritual case against capital punishment: Lord Longford befriended Myra Hindley right until the end, because he maintained "everyone can be redeemed". And yet perhaps a person might redeem his soul better by paying with his life for the life or lives he brutally extinguished - and, where the young are concerned, the futures he destroyed - in a ceremony that is terrifying in its symbolic power: that walk to the execution chamber. Mary Kenny, m...@mary-kenny.com (source: Opinion, The Guardian)
