Madam, - The comments of Mr Justice Richard Johnson (November 16th) have had a mainly negative reaction from your readers.
However, have any of your readers had a family member brutally murdered or seen the life of a law-abiding individual they love and admire senselessly wiped out?
Judges are not as divorced from reality as people imagine. They witness the agony which many families experience when the courts of justice impose a four- or five-year sentence for someone taking the life of another human being, while the survivors are condemned to bear the loss for the remainder of their natural lives.
Perhaps the debate should be about a punishment for capital murder which is more fitting to the families of the victim than a short custodial sentence? - Yours, etc,
BERNARD O'GRADY,
Queen's Avenue,
Muswell Hill,
London N10 3PE.
Madam, - Mr Justice Johnson's suggestion that the death penalty deters violent crime is wrong.
The most recent comprehensive survey of all research on the relationship between the death penalty and homicide rates, conducted for the UN in 1988 and updated in 2002, concluded that capital punishment does not deter murder any more than life imprisonment.
As Dr Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University pointed out in 2006, "There is no reliable, scientifically sound evidence that [ shows that executions] can exert a deterrent effect."
In Canada, the homicide rate is over a third lower than it was prior to the death penalty being abolished.
Restoring the death penalty in Ireland, as well as buying our ticket out of the European Union, where abandoning it is a requirement for membership, is also going against the trend globally.
At the end of 2008, 138 countries around the world had abolished the death penalty in law or in practice.
Only five countries - China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US - carry out 93 per cent of all executions worldwide.
Two US states, New Jersey and New Mexico, have recently abolished the death penalty and the US execution rate has hit its lowest point in decades.
New Mexico's governor Bill Richardson - who previously supported the death penalty - said that "the potential for . . . execution of an innocent person stands as anathema to our very sensibilities as human beings".
People are scared of violent crime. But I do not believe using a discredited form of punishment that is being abandoned across the world and leads inevitably to the deaths of innocent people will help anyone sleep easier at night.
The Irish people, who voted overwhelmingly in 2001 to remove all references to the death penalty in the Constitution, seem to agree. - Yours, etc,
COLM O'GORMAN,
Amnesty International Ireland,
Ballast House,
Westmoreland Street,
Dublin 2.
Madam, - There is a strong case to be made against the practice of the death penalty in peacetime criminal justice.
Aside from legitimate moral arguments - that a civilised state should not judicially kill except in war because, among other things, of the example being set - there are also credible grounds against its practice in the precedent of common law.
Common law accepts that legal practice - the work of solicitors, barristers, judges, court officials, etc - is fallible because, in its entirety, it is the collective work of human beings.
Human beings make mistakes, even in the most serious of circumstances and even in the utmost good faith. People also lie sometimes. If an innocent person is imprisoned, it devastates their lives but this can be remedied, to a certain extent, upon the quashing of their conviction. When a judicial remedy is, like the death penalty, irrevocable, this ignores the fundamental fallibility of all people and the systems they create, including those of criminal justice.
All civilised systems keep some margin of error, however narrow; the use of the death penalty removes such a margin. Death cannot be undone.
Another core principle of common law is that innocent people should not be punished. Admittedly, the jailing of a convict is, in many cases, a huge burden for their family but hardly comparable to a bereavement. When a convict is executed, they are not the only person punished - those closest to them are also getting a life sentence.
The death penalty has no proper place in Ireland or any other civilised society. - Yours, etc,
CHRISTIAN MORRIS,
Claremont Road,
Howth,
Dublin 13.