Jobless toll cut key to crime problem?

Press, 7 January 1987, Page 32

Jobless toll cut key to crime problem?

PA Wellington Murder and violent crime would be best tackled by a reduction in unemployment, not by the death penalty, a man who campaigned for the abolition of capital punishment in the 1950 s says. The former chairman of the National Committee for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, Mr Jim Delahunty, of Wellington, said support by the police commissioner, Mr Thompson, for reintroducing the death penalty in some cases was understandable, but simplistic.

The committee was active from 1955 until capital punishment was abolished by a conscience vote in Parliament in 1961. Sir Robert Muldoon was one of several mem-

bers of the National Government who crossed the floor to vote with Labour to end the death sentence.

Mr Delahunty said the murder rate and incidence of violent crime rose in wartime and during depressions. “We’ve been having a depression for about 10 years now,” he said. “If the Government wanted to improve the murder rate it should try to abolish unemployment. They’d also abolish suicide and crimes of violence.” Some serious miscarriages of justice could occur if the death penalty was reintroduced, Mr Delahunty said.

“Arthur Allan Thomas would have been a certainty for the death penalty. When the person’s

dead there’s not much point in chasing around to find whether it was right or wrong.”

In Britain a man was hanged for a spate of murders, but even after his death they continued in the same manner, Mr Delahunty said. The true murderer was caught later, he said.

The jury system would also make things difficult, he said. “It wouldn’t be a matter of law. It would (depend on) whether juries were sympathetic to the defendant or not.”

No statistics supported the view that countries or States which had the death penalty had a correspondingly lower murder rate, he said. The issue was complicated by

the complexity of degrees of murder.

"There are so many borderline cases in the degrees of homicide that it doesn’t work satisfactorily.”

A Royal commission in Britain in the 1950 s studied the death penalty for about four years and concluded it was not practical to work out which was the worst kind of murder, to be punished by death, Mr Delahunty said.

If there was to be a serious re-examination of the death sentence Mr Delahunty would want to see all information used in the 1950 s brought forward again.

Much of the evidence collected by the committee was now in the Turnbull Library.