Dear Friends

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

SADDAM HUSSEIN

I was interested to hear a Conservative Member of Parliament being interviewed on the radio, shortly after the execution of Saddam Hussein. He said that he had always been a supporter of capital punishment, but after the fiasco of Saddam’s execution, he was “reconsidering his position”. Opinion polls suggest that the majority of people in Britain remain in favour of capital punishment. In this, Parliament is out of step with the wishes of the majority; for when ever there is a vote, MP’s always overwhelmingly reject a return to the death penalty.

A PERSONAL VIEW

I have always been opposed to capital punishment. I have never been convinced by the arguments of those who say it is a deterrent to violent crime. The widespread use of the death penalty in much of the United States does not seem to have made for a safer and more peaceful society there. The consequences for a wrong conviction are also rather more serious (and final!) when execution is the punishment. However, my main objection to the death penalty is, I think, justified by the events surrounding Saddam’s death. And that is that I believe that execution demeans all who are involved with carrying it out; and brings out what is most base in our fallen human nature.

JUSTICE OR REVENGE?

Saddam was clearly an evil man; and there can be no doubt that he was guilty of the crimes with which he was charged - and many more besides. It is important that he was brought to justice; for the same reasons that war criminals in former Yugoslavia, or Rwanda should be held to account. What I found so disturbing about Saddam’s execution was not that his death was undeserved. But rather that his execution was turned into a public spectacle, which pandered to a rather ghoulish side to our nature, that many of us would prefer not to admit. The official pictures just prior to his death showed him having the noose placed around his neck; and the unofficial pictures, widely available on the Internet, showed the drop itself. What is so shocking is that so many of us found ourselves fascinated by it. I have no doubt that if public executions were ever restored in Britain (God forbid) they would prove as popular as they were in the eighteenth century. For human nature has not changed. But what is so disturbing is that the practice of execution will usually bring out in the perpetrators the sadistic and perverted extremes in our human nature. The death of Saddam was more about revenge and the desire to mentally torture and humiliate, than it was about justice. It is true that this punishment was no worse than what he meted out to his opponents. And at least he had a trial. But we see in his execution many of the common characteristics of capital punishment in other countries; not least the wish to humiliate and mentally abuse the condemned. In the United States there have been, in the past, instances where the condemned had been made to polish the electric chair; or where the executioners had deliberately prolonged the process of death. In China, the humiliation is extended to the family of the executed prisoner, who are sent a bill to pay for the fatal bullet.

GOLGOTHA

Amnesty continues to publicise the widespread use of execution throughout the world. With the patronage of St Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners, these matters should be of concern to us, as a church. In China, the death penalty is applied, not only for violent crimes, but for many economic crimes. In Iran, as in other fundamentalist Islamic countries, the sometimes-public execution of those convicted of sexual offences, is shocking to many of us in the West. In this Lenten season, we reflect that our faith is founded on one who was executed as a criminal, and who was on the receiving end of the basest instincts in human nature. He was the victim of a miscarriage of justice; he was tortured, mocked, abused and humiliated. He suffered one of the worst deaths ever devised by man. May we, this Holy Week, remember in our prayers, the many thousands of people throughout the world, both the guilty and the innocent, who will suffer the death penalty this year.

Stephen Carter