From the editor’s desk

Judicial killing demeans all

The strongest argument for the death penalty was the simple invocation of the name of Hitler - or in more recent days, Saddam Hussein. What fate but death could possibly be appropriate for the world's most wicked men? But the appalling images and stories from Saddam Hussein's actual execution chamber in Baghdad have dramatically reversed the argument. Here was irrefutable proof that execution dehumanises not just its victims but its perpetrators. It was a disgrace not just to the present Government in Iraq but also to those who put it in power, which has to include the British. If the ex-dictator of Iraq will be remembered for anything, it is the personal dignity he preserved in the face of taunts and insults even as the trap door opened beneath his feet, his prayers strangled in his throat.

Everything was wrong about the way Saddam was dealt with. The execution for the mass murder of 148 Shias in Dujail in 1982 was allowed to take precedence over the continuing trial of those, including Saddam, accused of responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Kurds later in the same decade. The Dujail trial itself was little more than a parody, though the evidence indicating Saddam's guilt was never really challenged. It was manifestly "victor's justice", a show trial, an opportunity for the Americans to gloat at the discomfiture of their old enemy. Certainly no alternative verdict could have been countenanced in Washington, whose own reputation for fair and just dealing in Iraq has been damaged yet again.

The idea that his execution was the judicial act of a sovereign government that had to be respected even if one disagreed with it - the British Government's line - was undermined by the way it was carried out as an act of sectarian vengeance, almost a public lynching, with several of those watching shouting out the name of the Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, and jeers in Arabic of "go to hell". The impious and disrespectful shambles was officially videoed, silently, for state television; and on mobile phone cameras, with sound-track. They were on the internet within hours.

The Catholic Church opposed the execution of Saddam Hussein on principle, as did the European Union and the British Government. In the latter cases, politicians admit that moral sensitivities have changed since the Second World War, not least as public opinion has come to see judicial execution as degrading both to those who carry it out and to those on whose behalf they act. The Catholic Church says that while capital punishment was once justified to preserve the common good, that is no longer true. This is not yet a powerful enough argument to swing opinion in the United States, even among Catholics, whose pro-life inclinations are somewhat selectively applied.

The fact that opinion in America was genuinely shocked by what it saw in Baghdad suggests that consciences may be awakening at last. The degrading scenes from Saddam's death chamber came just days after Catholic convert Jeb Bush, the Governor of Florida and the brother of the US President, halted all executions in his state after a prisoner took 34 minutes to die. What happens in the places of execution in Florida, or in Texas or Oklahoma, or indeed any of the 37 American states where judicial execution is permitted, is in principle neither less cruel nor demeaning to the executioners and those they purport to act for than what happened in Baghdad. At least Saddam Hussein did not have to endure the inhumanity of 20 years on death row, as some of those executed in America have done.