From the editor’s desk

Capital punishment brutalises society

THE FATAL shooting of a female police constable in Bradford, Yorkshire, has reopened the debate about capital punishment. Lord Stevens, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has argued in a newspaper article that the death penalty should be restored for the unique offence of murdering a police officer on duty. At first glance, public opinion appears to support him. But there were powerful reasons why Britain was right to drop capital punishment altogether, reasons still valid and in no way diminished by the appalling crime in Bradford.

Some support for restoring capital punishment may be seen as an immediate expression of sympathy for the colleagues, friends and family of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, who died answering a call to an armed robbery in the city. In other circumstances, such as the discovery of a serious miscarriage of justice that could have led to innocent people being executed, opinion tends to swing the other way. The quashing of the conviction of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven proved the fallibility of the criminal justice system and persuaded even someone as hard-line as Michael Howard, retiring leader of the Conservative Party, to change his mind.

As well as calls for the death penalty, there is also renewed debate about arming the police in Britain. On both issues, the police are themselves as divided as the rest of the community. Arming the police, many officers argue, would damage the relationship between themselves and the vast majority of the public. And there is no reason to suppose that the execution of those found guilty of murdering police officers would save a single life. Indeed, juries may be reluctant to convict such people even where they had good reason to.

Respect for the sacredness of human life does not automatically rule out the death penalty, at least if there was definite evidence that it might also help to preserve life. The Catholic Church?s position, expressed by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae in 1995, permits capital punishment ?in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society?. But it finds such instances ?very rare, if not practically nonexistent?. Although the Catholic bishops of the United States are often cited as being at odds with public opinion in that country as a result of such papal teaching, they have in fact opposed the death penalty since the mid 1970s. It was part of the ?seamless robe? argument of the late Cardinal Bernadin that a Church which condemns abortion had equally to condemn other public policies which seemed to hold life cheap, such as the widespread resort to judicial execution ? and even the reliance on nuclear weapons for national defence.

Apart from the United States, and partly as a reaction to that example, opinion in the rest of the Western world has moved solidly against capital punishment, a position now incorporated into the European Convention on Human Rights. It is inconceivable that such a shift would have taken place had there been solid evidence that capital punishment brought benefits. On the contrary, it cheapens life and brutalises those who have to carry it out. It has no place in a civilised society.