moâ

(It's been too long since I've pointlessly annoyed people)

When the death penalty was abolished in France (before I was born...) a majority of voters were against it. It was a political gamble to put it on the agenda (annoying the electorate vs. gaining votes by showing one had deep humanist convictions that aren't influenced by vote-gathering) but it worked. Today, a majority of French voters support the abolition of the death penalty - showing that it's very much a cultural issue that my be swayed by the general mores.

Perhaps it is because none of my compatriots were led to the Veuve Patibulaire in my lifetime that I am influenced by the maintream opinions of my generation: I however cannot comprehend how it is even possible to support the death penalty.

Miscarriages of justice do occur. Not often, but they happen. Sending an innocent to prison to pray for new evidence to be discovered whilst they get raped by inmates is hardly compassionate, but does seem a better alternative than giving them a comprehensive and final haircut.

But even if you do think a swift death is preferable to the long prison ordeal, a death sentence is murder. It is murder carried out by society as a whole, embodied by an independent institution, but it is murder nonetheless. It is one step better than taking justice in your own hands as it does grant both parties a right to make their case, and robs the punishment of some of the hot anger involved, but killing someone = murder, no matter how you institutionalise and attempt to justify it. If you live in a country that does have the death penalty - those jurors are selected by chance. Not hand-picked, not elected. That means it could be you. That means they represent you. That means the decision they take is yours. That means that when they send someone to the chair, you have killed that someone too. When you go to sleep at night, you know that you share responsibility for the murder of another human being. When you wake up, you know that today you may be murdering another human being by proxy. How you can square that with your conscience is utterly and completely beyond my comprehension.

But people who do wake up at the crack of down to find themselves facing a one-way window and a threatening-looking needle are monsters, you say. They're dangerous, they've done horrible things, their DNA was all over the victim's chopped up body parts, they'll be doing it again, they have to be removed from society for society's sake, etc.

No.

What some people have done or do is truly horrible and indeed nigh-impossible to understand for the overwhelming majority of us. Blasting up a plane, raping, or any of those crimes who are invoked to justify the death penalty are so glaring in their inhumanity that they do make us forget what humanity is. They set the perpetrators apart from the rest of us by the sheer horror of the deed. When facing their cruelty, their violence and the irrevocable finality of their actions, we feel helpless. How could that happen? How could we have let that happen, in our town, country, planet? But there is no going back in time to avoid the tragedy, and nothing we can do can guarantee its not happening again either. The only venue left to do something about it is to punish the culprit, and it is easy to vent all the frustration and pent-up disgust in that punishment.

But that's the crux of the argument. The inhumanity of the crime or indeed of the criminal does not mean we should stoop to their level. On the contrary, if a murderer manages to make the rest of us murder him (or her), they'll have won - they'll have made murder acceptable! The very same argument goes for compassionate shortening of sentences too - it was right to release the Lockerbie bomber. It is the ultimate proof of humanity and wisdom - promoting humanity and compassion in the face of evil is the surest way to defeat evil as it means we are stronger, fairer and undefeated in the face of all the horrors of the world.

Countries that countenance the death penalty, on the other hand, are barbaric. Extradition towards these countries should be banned, as neither their justice systems nor their society can be trusted, and their leaders should prepare to face The Hague someday. They stand last among nations: there are repellent criminals everywhere, but a country full of silent, everyday murderers by consensus is more loathsome than all of them put together.