I don’t believe in the death penalty.
I don’t think that the death penalty is an appropriate penalty in this day and age, and I am one of the many people who don’t subscribe to capital punishment. The US is the only western country to still carry out death penalty sentences, despite the fact that in 1972 the US Supreme court ruled that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
I also do not condone murder. I don’t believe that murder should go unpunished, and an aversion to the death penalty doesn’t mean that I take the crime of murder any less seriously.
The aversion to murder, and to the death penalty, are in many ways an extension of the same belief. That people have a right to life, and that we should - wherever possible, endeavour to treat people with the intrinsic dignity and respect that they deserve.
Does it mean that people shouldn’t be punished for breaking the law, or violating the social contract that binds us together as friends, families, communities and societies?
No. Of course not.
Actions have consequences, and the rule of law is one way of establishing and maintaining social norms that protect innocent people from the predatory and abusive tendencies of others. The rule of law is a way of leveling the playing field, creating avenues to opportunity, and ensuring that people can carry out their lives with some continuity and agency that they can rely on.
Anti Capital-punishment movements have existed for as long as there has been capital punishment. There are people who want to discuss the moral and ethical reasons as to why we should/shouldn’t have it. There are death penalty abolitionists, and death penalty supporters.
There is no pro-murder movement that I am aware of. No movement that is claiming to be for murder - in the way that we think about it in a domestic legal framework.
Put to the side the fact that there are plenty of pro-murder-other-people-in-other-places people. Plenty of murder if-its-in-support-of-my-cause people. Plenty of war hawks, and police-state enthusiasts. In the United States, there are people who endorse the killing of other people in a wide variety of circumstances, who would still say they are against murder. Murder isn’t self-defence, or defence of property, or putting down a protest, or warning people not to get too close, or subduing rioters, or looters. There is a long and dark history of lynching, which is another word for the macabre community ceremony surrounding a particular kind of racially motivated killing. A word that skirts around the fact that every lynching, actually was and is, a murder.
Still, I can have a discussion about the treatment of murderers, and the treatment of criminals, and appropriate punitive measures for both. I can be against capital punishment and easily avoid accusations of being pro-murder.
How then, can one be arrested, for the protesting of the Israeli response to the events of October 7th? How is it possible to be accused of endorsing an attack, because one disagrees with the response? How can one be accused of being anti an entire community - because of an aversion to the severity, and inhumanity of the response to a crime?
I was against the War in Iraq, against the War in Afghanistan. Wars predicated on false pretences, wars that left entire countries decimated, communities and infrastructure in tatters. I disagreed with the response of our government and the governments that invaded - and yet was, and remain, deeply saddened and moved by the events of 9/11. I remember the day, remember where I was, remember the horror of the burning and collapsing buildings and the desperation of the people who were trapped inside. I remember the call logs, the voicemails and the brave first responders who attended with no thought to their own safety, many of whom tragically perished in the clouds of dust, concrete and debris.
I didn’t agree with the actions of our government, and yet I was powerless as an individual to stop them. If a foreign power like Iraq or Afghanistan held our civilian population fully responsible, and set about blowing up the housing that I lived in, under the pretence that I am directly responsible for the invasion of their country - there would have been outrage, understandable and justified.
War crimes are crimes because we have come together at times, and decided that there are limits to what humans should have to endure - even during times of conflict.
Crimes against humanity exist as a category, because we have reflected on the failures of the past, and made a commitment to avoid making them the failures of the future also. We have acknowledged the dignity and intrinsic value of human lives, and the rights of people everywhere to living their lives free from oppression and violence.
And there are the children.
It’s one thing to disagree with the death penalty. I know not everyone disagrees with it. Surely, SURELY, no one believes that a child should face the death penalty for a crime allegedly committed by someone who:
a.) looks a bit like them,
b.) lives near them,
c.) is related to them in some way,
d.) is from the same country as them.
Without trial, without even being aware of any connection to someone who perhaps did commit a crime - how on earth could we ever allow a child, let alone a generation of children, to bear the responsibility of those actions?
Infants. Toddlers. Kids. Pre-Teens. Teens. Humans - all of them.
Every day there are new horrors. Beaming through our phones and television screens in high definition. More dead children. More starving families. More decimated homes. More flattened neighbourhoods. More death. More sadness. More destruction.
You will have to excuse my incredulity. You will have to excuse the fact that I cannot stomach the ‘reasons’ why this is occurring. In my lifetime, the ‘reasons’ have more often than not turned out to be false. In my lifetime we have seen the world stand by while atrocities, death, famine, destruction have carried on unabated. We have regretted them, individually and collectively.
For every 8 people killed on death row, one has been exonerated - surely reason enough to give pause to the whole institution.
There were no WMD in Iraq - and there never were.
Afghanistan was turned back over to the Taliban, after the longest war our countries have fought in, stranding thousands of people and leaving them in harms way, after hundreds of thousands of deaths, injuries and trauma.
The US entry to the Vietnam war was predicated on a lie.
In my lifetime, and at the front of my memory, UN Peacekeepers observed a genocide in Rwanda, and war crimes were committed on an enormous scale in the Bosnian war of the 90’s.
The war in Sudan rages on. Unspeakable horrors continue.
Women and children invariably bear the brunt of all of these moments in time. Moments from which we should have learned, and yet the people who speak up are the ones who are being punished.
I have very dear Jewish friends. I have a deep love for them, and I have a deep desire for all people to live without fear of being persecuted, killed, discriminated against. It is because of that love that I cannot fathom a world in which speaking up on behalf of maimed and orphaned children who live in tents, and rags - is considered an act of sedition. I cannot believe that the people who want to help innocent victims, putting their own lives on the line to look after the most vulnerable people on the planet, can be harmed with impunity.
I don’t condone murder.
I don’t condone the death penalty.