Requiem for death sentence?

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 24

Requiem for death sentence?

Parliament this week accepted for consideration a bill that will do away with the remaining elements of capital punishment in New Zealand law. PETER LUKE compares the contrasting debates on the death sentence in New Zealand and the United States.

NEW ZEALAND effectively did away with the gallows in 1961 when a National Government revised the Crimes Act. Earlier, the first Labour Government had abolished hanging for murder, but capital punishment was reinstated by the subsequent National administration. The second Labour Government did not change the law, it simply did not enforce the death penalty. So, in 1961, it was left to National’s most notable Minister of Justice, Ralph Hanan, to perform a politically curious task. In September that year he introduced a Crimes Bill that still prescribed the gallows as the ultimate punishment for murder, but at great length during the Second Reading he forcefully recommended to Parliament that it replace hanging with life imprisonment in these clauses. Mr Hanan prevailed. Over the objections of another National Party notable, Sir John Marshall, the death penalty was removed from the statute books except for treason and certain breaches of military discipline. Almost three decades later it has fallen to a Labour backbencher, Mr Bill Dillon (Hamilton East), to attempt to excise this last shadow of the gallows from New Zealand law. A private member’s bill he introduced this week, the Abolition of the Death Penalty Bill, intends that references to capital punishment in both the Crimes Act (treason) and in the Armed Forces Discipline Act be replaced by life imprisonment. The bill also seeks to prevent a person being extradited from this country if he or she is likely to face the death penalty. Only six votes — all by National members — were recorded as opposing this bill being referred to a Select Committee. Between Mr Hanan’s powerful Second Reading speech, and the Dillon bill the United States has

been through its own debate over capital punishment. Just as in this country in the two decades before 1961, when a murderer’s fate could depend on an election result, Supreme Court rulings on capital punishment have been of vital concern to many an American murderer. Most American death penalty statutes are state, not federal, law. The United States Supreme Court ruled these laws unconstitutional and effectively barred the death penalty for about five years in the 19705. A subsequent Supreme Court decision effectively allowed rewritten capital statutes. The Bible Belt states of the American south, with murder rates several times higher than New Zealand’s, rushed to get the electric chair back into law early this decade. In many parts of the American south, the electric chair rates alongside fried chicken, blackened catfish, the pick-up, and the gun as symbols of normal society. Such symbols have a political significance. Not the least of the southern woes last year for the Democrat presidential hopeful, Michael Dukakis, was that he favours doing away with capital punishment for murder. That translated in some quarters as being soft on crime; and became a political liability in much of the south. The issue came to a head in the second televised debate between Dukakis and his opponent for the White House, George Bush. Dukakis, right at the start of the debate, was asked how he would feel about the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, was raped and murdered. At issue was not simply the Democrat’s liberalism, but his equally damning reputation as the unfeeling, technocratic “iceman." In 1961, Ralph Hanan, asked himself the same question during his Second Reading speech. “The only reply I could make to that is that, for me, the

emotional reaction would be the same as for everybody else, but whether it would be reason, is another question. Reason, I submit, teaches us that capital punishment does not deter.” Dukakis, 27 years later, tried to say the same thing but, clearly shocked by the question, was not convincing. Through the towns of the south the next day the damage had been done. The American debate centred round capital punishment for murder, an issue resolved in New Zealand almost three decades ago, but even as Mr Dillon was planning his private member’s bill to remove the death penalty from New Zealand law completely, American politicans were moving the other way. In a pre-election crack-down on drugs, a federal bill was passed last year which would

allow courts to give “Drug czars” the death sentence. In Georgia, local politicians were trying to devise ways to shorten the lengthy appeals process between sentencing and execution. The delay of between five years and two decades, and the expensive legal jockeying in state and federal appellate courts, results in a paradoxical situation. It costs more to pass a death sentence than it does to give the usual alternative sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole. Such pre-election posturing to a voting public scared of violent crime is not purely an American phenomenon. In New Zealand long-standing but vague calls to bring back the rope hit centre stage before the 1987 election. In an election promise,

National vowed to hold a referendum on the death penalty. A largely-hostile public reaction ensured that any National sponsored referendum would not be binding, and National politicans refused to commit themselves to voting for hanging for murder. The six National members who this week opposed the introduction of Mr Dillon’s bill believe that for exceptional treason or treachery, especially in times of war, the death penalty should be available.

That the existing death penalty clauses are unlikely ever to be used does not detract from the importance of Mr Dillon’s bill. The issues raised in any debate over hanging or executions cut to the core of a society — as much in New Zealand as in the American south.