Capital punishment

Press, 11 July 1983, Page 20

Capital punishment

The British Parliament is expected to debate and vote this week on whether capital punishment should be reintroduced in most of Britain. At present, only the Isle of Man retains death as the sentence for the most serious crimes. The death penalty was abolished in Britain in 1965. Since then, increases in acts of terrorism, especially in Northern Ireland, and a general increase in crimes of violence, have moved public opinion strongly back in favour of capital punishment. A recent opinion poll showed 90 per cent would like to see terrorists and child murderers hung; about 80 per cent want the death penalty for offenders who kill policemen, or who commit murder in the course of armed robberies.

Members of Parliament will not be bound by party discipline in the debate, or the vote on the issue. They will be free to take the line indicated by their consciences, or by expediency, or by what their electors seem to want. Parliaments are generally less bloodthirsty than the electorate. The large number of new members after the recent election in Britain — many of them Conservatives of strong views — makes the outcome hard to predict. Hanging may well be rejected again, but it may be rejected by a narrow margin.

In spite of the increase in violent crimes in New Zealand and the increasingly reckless use of weapons by criminals, there has so far been little pressure here from public opinion to restore the death penalty for offences in peacetime. The death penalty was abolished in 1961. An article on this page today implies that New Zealanders are showing a commendable restraint. The arguments set out suggest that, however satisfying the superficial appeal of a punishment that seems final and absolute, the reintroduction of the death sentence is likely to create more problems than it solves. The Parliamentary debate in Britain is providing an opportunity for a wide reassessment of matters of crime and punishment, and of the place of sentences in the judicial system. The courts in Britain, as in New Zealand, attempt when sentencing to achieve a balance between attitudes that are

hard to reconcile, and sometimes impossible to reconcile. Is the object of dealing with an offender mainly to deter others, to rehabilitate if possible, to extract compensation for injured parties, to express society’s sense of outrage, or simply to exact revenge? Society’s attitudes change, along with fashions in sentencing. In New Zealand, the official pendulum has swung strongly in favour of rehabilitation at least in theory. Deterrence and compensation remain important, but a determination for revenge — at the very core of the case for capital punishment — has become distasteful to many people. Christians might see this as a conflict between the precepts of the Old Testament and the New; between the injunction to take “an eye for an eye” and the exhortation to “forgive one’s enemies.” A democratic society and its representatives in Parliament, are more likely to construct a policy of punishment on the grounds of how effective it might be in reducing criminal offences. Some might argue that nothing works very well and that little can be lost by experiments; but this argument can as easily be used to defend a reduction in penalties as to justify a return to a final and irrevocable punishment. The best argument against capital punishment must surely be that while it satisfies the desire of a section of society for revenge, it cannot rehabilitate, may seldom deter, and can well provoke the offences it seeks to prevent. The United States, where the death penalty is coming back into use, is not noticeably a less violent society as a result. States such as the Soviet Union and South Africa that execute a large number of people each year, seem not to have a decline in the number of serious offenders. In Britain, the new Parliament is likely to find that while morality and expediency, for once, concur in opposing capital punishment, both are in conflict with a society that wants revenge, at least for the most serious offences. The debate and its outcome this week will be lively but it is not likely to produce a single new or unanswerable reason for bringing back capital punishment.