Madam, – Mr Justice Richard Johnson’s suggestion that the reintroduction of the death penalty might be “looked at” is deeply troubling (News, November 16th).
Leave aside the fact that of the 197 countries listed in a recent study on the issue, 152 have abolished the death penalty, or haven’t executed anyone in years. Leave aside the fact that the 45 countries that retain the penalty include Afghanistan, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Yemen, Zimbabwe and, famously, the United States.
Leave aside the fact that studies in the US have shown the death penalty serves as no deterrent to serious, violent crime.
Leave aside Ireland’s international legal obligations – as a member of the European Union and the Council of Europe – to keep the death penalty off its statute book.
Leave all that aside and consider the retiring judge’s belief that “if the people want it, they should have it”.
As he leaves the High Court bench, has he also taken leave of his senses? – Yours, etc,
A chara, – For Ireland to reinstate the death penalty, it would also have to leave the European Union, which requires abolition of capital punishment as a condition of membership.
It would be expelled from the Council of Europe, which it proudly helped to found in 1949. And it would be condemned by the UN Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights, because it cannot bring back the noose without violating international treaties to which it has subscribed.
Nearly 150 countries have now abolished the death penalty. The move toward universal abolition of capital punishment is one of the most remarkable trends in modern criminal justice. Only a handful of states really employ it with any enthusiasm, Saudi Arabia and Iran being the leading practitioners.
Even in China and the United States, the numbers of executions are dropping steadily each year.
– Is mise,
Madam, – I find the notion of even “revisiting” the question of the death penalty utterly repugnant. We have taken some steps backward in terms of our economic performance – and can perhaps expect an increase in violent “property” crime as a result – but to contemplate a return to killing in the name of the State is manifestly retrograde.
It cannot be extrapolated from murder statistics in any era that the death penalty per sewas or is a deterrent. Cultural and religious strictures, not to mention the relative dearth of "property" to be plundered in times past, would have been hugely instrumental in the fact that murder was a rare and horrifying phenomenon in Ireland even as recently as the 1960s.
Arguably the growth of paramilitary violence since that time inured us to the shock experienced when murder was only occasionally reported, and the welcome cessation of the Troubles has unfortunately been succeeded by gangland killings.
However, it is to be hoped that the long sentences handed down in the recent “Tiger kidnapping” trial may serve as a deterrent to people contemplating similar crimes.
Likewise, I believe that if a sentence of “life without the possibility of parole” was mandatory in cases of aggravated murder, including killings carried out during armed robberies, we might have some hope of deterring such crime without returning to the barbarity of the death penalty, or indeed risk the ultimate injustice of wrongful conviction in cases carrying a sentence of execution. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I had thought that the issue of capital punishment – a barbarous practice – had long been closed in this country. Mr Justice Richard Johnson’s comments are therefore somewhat surprising, since capital punishment is, at best, a distraction from other, much more pressing matters relating to criminal justice.
Punishment should perform three functions – retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation. While it is clear that the death penalty is the ultimate retributive punishment, it lamentably fails the other two tests.
The Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949-53) examined British statistics in the half-century to 1950. Its analysis showed conclusively that murder did not carry any certainty of execution whatsoever. Only one-in-12 murders in the period resulted in a prosecution. In other words, if you committed a murder in that period, you had a better chance of getting away with it than winning €4 on a lottery scratch-card. Even of those charged and convicted, only just over half faced the death penalty; the others were given life imprisonment or reprieved – sometimes apparently capriciously – by the relevant home secretary. The state was notoriously reluctant to execute women and very young people. The hangings of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis in the 1950s – both young, both (in the eyes of many people) morally innocent – were therefore all the more shocking for not having been stopped by the then home secretaries, and led to a sea change in political and public opinion on the death penalty.
The Death Penalty Information Center in the US states: “Around the country, death sentences have declined 60 per cent since 2000 and executions have declined almost as much. Yet maintaining a system with 3,300 people on death row and supporting new prosecutions for death sentences that likely will never be carried out is becoming increasingly expensive and harder to justify. The money spent to preserve this failing system could be directed to effective programs that make society safer.”
Restoration of capital punishment would, in any case, require us to leave the EU, and secede from the European Convention on Human Rights – hardly practical politics.
Ultimately, it is a moral and ethical issue, and all the technical arguments are beside the point if just one innocent person is executed.
As Mr Justice Johnson recognises, there, but for the grace of God and the 1964 Labour government which abolished capital punishment for murder, go the Birmingham Six. – Yours, etc,