As a supporter of the death penalty, I wish the US would just stop executing people. I have quite enough trouble with those who tell me that Lucy Letby — whose case I seek to reopen — would be hanged if I had my way on capital punishment. This isn’t true. I won’t support executions in Britain again until we restore proper unanimous juries of experienced people. At the moment an 18-year-old may serve on a jury. Surely some way can be found of ensuring that jurors have seen something of human life and experience before deciding the fates of others?

But the thing that will probably ensure that my side will never win is the application of the death penalty in the USA. Almost every time they do it, they destroy or obscure the important arguments in favour of lawful execution of heinous murderers. The latest botched state killing of Christa Pike in Tennessee, does not actually make any general case against the idea of the death penalty. But it definitely helps penal liberals in their endless propaganda against it.

Lethal injection has turned out to be far from the painless, gentle procedure it was supposed to be. But would brief, violent methods, such as hanging, be any more acceptable? Possibly. In practice, many are untroubled by state violence against criminals. Each year in the USA, police shoot and kill about 1,000 suspects. British liberals say little about this, even though getting a slug of lead in the head or guts is not really a nice way to go, and mistakes are inevitable.

It’s easy to see why this isn’t as controversial as execution. Hot-blooded killing is somehow easier to accept than a cold, emotionless process of death. In the same way, opposition to spending public money on training pilots to bomb foreign cities is hardly confined to pacifists. Yet the principle behind doing so — deterrence — is more or less the same as the principle behind lawful execution. When these aircraft are used, innocent people will die. But when it is part of war, we accept it.

What makes people queasy about execution is also the best thing about it: due process. They recoil from the pinioning and killing of a defenceless human, even if they are sure he has done a terrible crime. But shouldn’t we want to deter people from carrying lethal weapons, which pose an increasing peril to us all? Shouldn’t we wish to deter rapists and thieves from killing the only witnesses to their crimes? Mightn’t the unique deterrent power of the death penalty make us a less violent society?

But in the US, executions can also serve a political purpose, allowing minor politicians to demonstrate their toughness on crime. The penalty is performative rather than serving as a deterrent. Even those states which employ capital punishment execute a tiny proportion of their murderers. And they take so long to do it that the killer has usually forgotten what he or she did. At the time of writing, it has been 31 years, eight months and 21 days since Christa Pike murdered Colleen Slemmer. It is 30 years, six months and two days since Pike was sentenced to death.

This is exceptionally long, but in many American murder cases the gap is now about 20 years. This is quite absurd. I loathe very long prison sentences and think they are fantastically cruel (another of the strongest arguments for execution). But to kill someone decades after their crime, after long years of incarceration which will drive many people mad, and destroy the souls of the rest, is the worst of both worlds.

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Peter Hitchens is a columnist for The Mail on Sunday and author of A Revolution Betrayed.

ClarkeMicah

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