Saturday 6 February 2010

Hello, my name is Lise and I am AGAINST the death penalty

You may wonder why I feel the need to assert that, given that I live in the UK and was born nearly two decades after the death penalty was abolished here. Here are some reasons:
  • The idea of the death penalty as a deterrent is bullshit. I seriously doubt London and Birmingham have less of a murder problem than certain US cities where capital punishment is deployed.
  • If the state can kill you, that's a very high level of control...
  • Killing someone because killing is wrong? Er...
  • The death penalty is still used by too many countries, including the US and China - still used = worth being against it in my fairly considered opinion.
  • You think it's irrelevant here? When I was young bringing back hanging was voted on reglarly in the House of Commons. The reason it hasn't been raised there for a while is down to an EU ban. I don't trust Eurosceptics not to gain sufficient power to resist it.
  • And let's not ignore that 'bring back hanging' is can be heard Every. Damn. Time. there is a high-profile murder.
  • Regardless of whether you agree with the death penalty in cases where guilt can be proven, the fact remains that it has been wrongly deployed in too many cases. Scratch that - one such case would be too many!
See the truly ace Reprieve for more information.

Albert Pierrepoint, the last executioner in Great Britain, turned against the death penalty later in life:

2 comments:

Ben said...

"The idea of the death penalty as a deterrent is bullshit. I seriously doubt London and Birmingham have less of a murder problem than certain US cities where capital punishment is deployed."

Not sure I get this. Are you saying a deterrent's unnecessary because we have less of a problem over here?

If London and Birmingham did have a lower murder rate, that could be used as evidence that the deterrent doesn't work in US. But i) that's what you say you doubt, and ii) it's hardly a fair test because there are many other differences between UK and US (not least availability of guns).

Anonymous said...

We have a really good anti-death penalty blog written for our local paper in Albany, NY.

http://blog.timesunion.com/kaczynski

I'm not sure how notorious the Unibomber was over there, but here he was a pretty big deal, with all his mailing bombs to folks and killing them. Ultimately, he was turned in by his own brother, who recognized his brother from the Unibomber's manifesto he got some papers to publish.

That brother, David, is the author of the blog and a big anti death-penalty activist.

It's very interesting. He talks a lot about his relationships with other families who have been effected by the death penalty.

It's all such bs. The death penalty over here has all sorts of problems, the most glaring being that it's not applied fairly across the board. Even if one believes an eye for an eye is a smart move (which I don't), you'd at least want to use the same criteris across the board,right? It's a mess.