Crime and...Punishment?

At some point in the next 12 to 24 hours, 42 year old Steven Ray Thacker will walk from his cell in the execution block at the state penitentiary and make his final journey to the chamber where the state of Oklahoma has sentenced him to die.  In December 1999/January 2000 Thacker murdered three people; Laci Dawn Hill, Forrest Reed Boyd and Ray Patterson.  Three victims in three days across three states.  By any account - and to anyone with even a shred of humanity and conscience - this was a despicable act and the perpetrator should rightly be prosecuted and punished.  In Oklahoma, this means Steven Ray Thacker will die.

I have always been against the death penalty.  Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that anyone who commits a crime should be duly punished for what they've done; I also believe, however, that the person should then be educated and rehabilitated in order to try and turn them into a fully-functioning member of society.  Sadly this is isn't always possible; a lot of my studies into serial murder and violent crime have taught me that sometimes a person cannot be rehabilitated and released - as one of my heroes, former FBI 'profiler' John Douglas says, how can you rehabilitate a person when there's nothing to rehabilitate to?  The likes of Ted Bundy or Jeffery Dahmer, for example, or someone like Ian Brady in this country, don't have anything inside them that any mental health professional or legal establishment could work with to produce a functioning member of society; whether by nature, nurture, some other 'explanation' or a combination of all of the above, some people are never going to be able to walk around in public without wanting to hurt and kill as many other people as violently as they can.  So yes, if you commit as heinous a crime as Steven Ray Thacker did then I fully support your being prosecuted for it.  There will be no tears from me in the public gallery when you are brought to trial and held accountable for your actions, regardless of whether you personally believe yourself accountable or not.  And if the Court, in its infinite wisdom, decides to sentence you to spend the rest of your  natural life behind bars because you are too dangerous to ever be released and too 'other', too 'gone' to respond to any form of rehabilitative procedure then I for one will be congratulating the judiciary on its wise and learned response.  I might sigh a futile sigh at the nature of Man; may even feel a little regret that you cannot be helped, but I will certainly feel a heck of a lot safer that you are behind the iron bars and solid stone walls of Her Majesty's Prison.  I would shake my head, shrug my shoulders, applaud a sense of Justice Well Done, and go on my merry way.

What I could not do, however, is sleep as easily if I knew you were to be executed...

The contradiction in terms is stark, I know.  There are people, many people, who cannot be helped and can never be freed; people who cost us taxpayers a small fortune to keep them and people who, sometimes, seem to be better off in many ways than some well-behaved segments of society.  We've all tutted over the Daily Mail's revelations of prisoners having pool tables and Sky TV and lord alone knows what else (although having watched the excellent documentary series about life inside Aylesbury Young Offenders Institution I suddenly see why all these things are necessary - to prevent the prisoners going stark staring bonkers and killing themselves, each other, or the excellent men and women of the Prison Service.  Frankly, the use of a few pool tables is a small price to pay if you ask me...)  But no matter how 'evil' we think a person is, no matter how reprehensible their crime and how deep their total lack of empathy or remorse, I cannot condone the idea of so-called civilised nations carrying out what is, to all intents and purposes, state sponsored murder.  Its the judicial equivalent of me smacking you on the bare arse with my belt while yelling at you that it's terribly, awfully wrong of you to hit your little sister.

The comparison may be trite but the example makes its point.  How can we, as honest, decent, upright citizens who abide by the moral code of our society, honestly accept that it's perfectly all right for the Government whose laws we obey to break their own rules?  Taking someones life is considered morally and legally wrong by most of us, yet when it comes to taking the life of someone like Steven Thacker - monstrous though his crimes are - we sit by and allow it to happen?  I have never understood how a world which claims to prize life so highly (look at the number of anti-abortion movements in America, for example) can at the same time be so wilfully dismissive of that same prized entity; or is it just that we can be picky about which lives we care about - unborn foetuses yes, but those who have committed a crime, no chance?

I've read many arguments against the death penalty over the years, not least the stark statistics which show that, far from being the deterrent the Powers-That-Be claim it to be, there are more and more people being convicted of the most violent and despicable crimes in states which still have the death penalty.  Many of those who are convicted of these crimes are subsequently sent to Death Row.  Of these individuals, one person is released from prison after an average of ten years after new evidence proves them innocent for every ten who are executed.  That terrifies me.  How many of those ten who didn't go free were also innocent?  Maybe none of them, but how can we be certain?  It's a lot easier to let someone go free after ten years in a jail cell, institutionalised though they will almost certainly be, than is it to attempt to make amends with a corpse.  The morality argument, the statistical burden of proof, the number of unknowns...that's why I support Amnesty International's work to end the use of the death penalty; it's why I'm supporting the One For Ten project...I just can't see any justification for taking a life as punishment for life.  In the very crudest terms, how is it making you suffer for what you've done if I just snuff you out?

But the most eloquent argument for ending the use of the death penalty I have ever read comes from Charity Lee, founder of The ELLA Foundation.  The Foundation is named after her daughter, who was sexually assaulted, beaten and murdered when she was just four years old.  The perpetrator?  Charity's son and Ella's brother Paris, who was thirteen at the time.  How any mother could go through what Charity has and still be sane is beyond me; that she has gone on to use her experiences to become such a powerful and eloquent speaker is remarkable, but what is even more remarkable is the way she speaks about why she doesn't believe in the death penalty.  The full text of her argument moved me to tears and I strongly recommend that you read it (it's too long to add to this blog but the link is here), but this is the part which sums up her feelings and which I wholeheartedly agree with, and it seems the perfect way to end this blog post...

"One way we rise above our base instincts is to believe, wholeheartedly, that all killing is wrong. Period. No matter who does the killing. All human life is sacred and should be treated as such, especially in our darkest hours as a human being. There is no justice in killing another human being. None. All it brings is more pain, more violence, more murder, into the world. I for one am trying to lessen all of the above in mine.