NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
PAGE
TITLE:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
ARTICLE
TITLE:
If it's all right for Cuba to have the death penalty, why can't we have it too?
DATE: 26 February 2008
AUTHOR: Peter Hitchens
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October
1951) is an English foreign correspondent and author. He has published six
books, including The Abolition of Britain, A Brief History of Crime,
The Broken Compass, The Rage Against God and The War We Never
Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs.
Hitchens writes for Britain's The Mail on
Sunday newspaper, and describes himself as a Burkean conservative. A former
foreign correspondent based in Moscow and later Washington, Hitchens continues
to work as an occasional foreign reporter, and appears frequently in the
British broadcast media. He is the younger brother of the late writer
Christopher Hitchens.
 |
|
Peter Hitchens
|
I was struck last week by the treacly response
given to the retirement of the grisly old monster, Fidel Castro. In so many
leftist media, from the BBC to the Guardian, we were offered the usual muck
about Cuba's supposedly excellent schools and health care, by people who
referred to the pensioner tyrant by his Christian name, 'Fidel', as if he were
a personal friend rather than one of the remotest and most inaccessible
dictators in the world.
They also pretended that Cuba's 'National Assembly'
was a real Parliament rather than what it is, an appointed chamber of toadies
and puppets, and - though they claim to be outraged by the powerless British
monarchy being handed on from father to son - they were un-outraged by
the handing over of real supreme authority from brother to brother. Vertical
inheritance is all wrong. Horizontal's cool. Republicans, they're so
ridiculous, can you beat them?
What would these people think of someone who
referred to General Pinochet as 'Augusto', or if he had handed over power
to his sibling? And why - I'll come to this at length later -
is Castro allowed to maintain the death penalty, and to keep his popularity
with the Left , whereas if I say I'm in favour of it, I'm a pariah from one end
of Islington to the other?
By the way, I think all these pro-Castro (
sorry 'Fidel') people should be compelled, if they fall ill, to go to Cuba and
- without access to hard currency - be left to endure the Cuban health service
they so idiotically praise, under the same conditions suffered by the Cuban
people. I think we would then hear a lot less about Castro's marvellous
health service. The main 'evidence' for this claim comes of course from the
Cuban state, famous for its severe prevention of independent journalism or any
other critical examination of its activities.
As for the schools, they may well be better than
ours at teaching children to read (not difficult) but some, notably the Lenin
High School in Havana, are a good deal less equal than others. Like its British
equivalents, the London Oratory, William Ellis and the Camden High School for
Girls, the Lenin High School provides the children of a leftist elite with a
far better education than they might get elsewhere. Everyone in Havana knows
this. Why doesn't the Guardian know it? Or the BBC?
Anyway, the problem with being educated in Cuba is
that, once you've been educated, there's nothing to read except the works
of K. Marx and V.Lenin, or of course the collected speeches of F.Castro and
E.Guevara. - and the world's worst and most absurdly-titled newspaper 'Granma'.
(I'll explain later how this journal gets its ludicrous name).
But back to the death penalty. The countries which
wield this most keenly these days are all left-wing states. The People's
Republic of China, of course, tops the world execution league. The Socialist
Republic of Vietnam is also quite a keen execution state - supposedly 'corrupt'
businessmen have been shot in public, with lemons stuffed in their mouths to
stop them screaming.
And then there's Cuba. The jolly, liberal fun
revolution of 1959, with all those glamorously-bearded young men in fatigues in
charge, began with howling show trials (the few not-guilty verdicts reversed on
a whim by the leader himself) and much spraying of bullets, screaming and
splattering of blood, a lot of it ordered by the picturesque Ernesto Guevara.
The bullet-pocks from the firing squads can still be inspected (I have done so)
in the moat of the La Cabana fortress, now a tourist site but until recently a
squalid prison. Total figures for those judicially murdered by the Castro
terror are not available, but the distinguished Historian Hugh Thomas has put
the figure (perhaps modestly) at 5,000.
More recent executions have been colder, more
secret and even more sinister. The 1989 shooting of General Arnaldo Ochoa,
after a largely secret trial, ostensibly for alleged drug trafficking, is
generally thought in Cuba to have been the despotic snuffing out of a dangerous
rival who might have defected. Ochoa, a former ' hero of the revolution, technically
faced a maximum of 20 years in prison for his crime. But in lawless Cuba, where
'Fidel' was all-powerful, Ochoa went to the firing squad anyway. It was typical
of Cuba that a political case should have been dressed up as a criminal one, so
that Castro could continue to pretend that he has no political prisoners.
Opponents of the regime are almost invariably persecuted for imagined or
fanciful violations of the criminal code.
So why do the Left swallow this camel, praising
and sucking up to and romanticising this sordid despotism, and ignoring its
habit of killing opponents, but strain at the gnat of hanging a few
heinous murderers here in Britain?
It's all from the same root - the Left's worship of
the supposedly all-benevolent state which they control, or hope to control. Get
in the way of that, and you can be liquidated. It is the supreme law, and you
will be an expendable casualty in a wider war. In fact, most socialists
once they have supreme power, happily reintroduce the death penalties they
campaigned against when they were powerless.
When I pointed out in my 'Brief History of Crime'
that the 1930s English barrister D.N.Pritt, a prominent campaigner against the
death penalty was a leading apologist for Stalin's show trials ( which always
ended in death for the accused), I drew upon myself the livid rage of leftist
critics. How dare I suggest an inconsistency in the Left on the basis of this
horrible man? Yet when it comes to the Stalins of today, the Pritts of today
still suffer from the same doublethink. You can work out who I'm getting at.
And now, for those of you faced with arguments at
work or in the pub about the death penalty, I shall now provide a Question and
Answer guide to the case for hanging.
Q. Well, I would be in favour of the death penalty,
but I am worried about innocent people being hanged. Doesn't that fear make it
impossible to have a death penalty?
A. No. It is a perfectly good argument for taking a
huge amount of trouble to ensure that innocents are not executed. It is also a
good argument for bringing back some sort of property or education
qualification for juries, and abolishing majority verdicts. Nobody should be
hanged except on a unanimous verdict of mature and educated people. But the
world isn't perfect, and we don't let this concern for the innocent stand in
the way of lots of other policies, many of them supported by the very people
who raise this objection to execution.
For instance, every three years, two people
are killed by convicted murderers released early from prison. These victims are
innocent. In that case, the liberals who advance this argument would have to
accept that every convicted murderer should be locked up for life without the
chance of parole so as to avoid the risk to the innocent. But they don't
believe this. So where's their concern for innocent death now? Then again, most
people supported the Kosovo war and still do (especially liberals). But when we
bombed Serbia, we knew that innocents were bound to die, and they duly did die
- including the make-up lady at the Belgrade TV station. That didn't stop these
liberal leftists, who oppose hanging guilty murderers, from supporting it, and
continuing to support it after those deaths had taken place.
Not a liberal leftist? Then there's our mad
transport policy which just happens to suit quite a lot of us down to the
ground, of relying so heavily on motor cars that we require an incredibly
feeble driving test and allow tens of thousands of unskilled people to drive
cars at a far too young age. We know from experience that this will result,
every year, in at least 3,000 deaths. Yet we do nothing.
Our failure to act, in the knowledge that this
failure will lead to those deaths, is deliberate, conscious self-interested
negligence, morally equivalent to deliberate proxy killing for personal
advantage (as offered by Harry Lime to Holly Martins in the Big Wheel in 'The
Third Man'). It is also the reason why the courts don't adequately punish those
who kill while driving. We're all conscious that driving isn't really safe,
that we impose far too much responsibility on drivers in a fundamentally dangerous
system, and that it could so easily have been us who did the killing.
Personally I think this intolerable carnage is a much more urgent problem in
our society than the faint hypothetical risk of hanging someone for a murder he
didn't commit. So is the growing level both of homicide itself, and of violence
that would be homicidal were it not for our superb emergency surgeons, who
nightly drag back dozens from the lip of the grave.
People dislike being told this because it is
absolutely true and very harrowing. These deaths are all of innocent
people. If the fear of killing an innocent person really was an overwhelming
veto on a public policy, then the driving test would have to made so difficult
that most of us could never pass it, speed limits would have to be lower than
they are now, and private car ownership restricted to a tiny few
highly-skilled persons.
The truth is that the fear of killing innocents is
not a reason to abolish or ban capital punishment. If it were, we'd have
to abolish the armed services and be forced to ride bicycles. It's an excuse
for people not to face up to their responsibilities.
Q. How can you express moral disapproval of
killing, by killing someone else?
A. It is not killing we are trying to express
loathing for. It is murder. All of us, except absolute pacifists, accept
that killing is sometimes justified. In simple self-defence, the case is easy.
In defensive war, in which aggressive actions are permitted, less
straightforward but still acceptable to most of us. And I think quite a few of
us would be ready to forgive and condone in advance an assassination of an
aggressive tyrant before he could embark on war. So we license armed forces to
shoot back at our attackers, or to attack our attackers in retaliation or deterrence.
What we are disapproving of is murder ( the
Commandment is not, as so often said 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' but 'Thou Shalt do
no Murder'). This remember, is the deliberate, premeditated, merciless (and
often prolonged and physically cruel in the extreme)killing of an innocent
person, generally for the personal gain of the murderer. There is no comparison
between such an action and the lawful, swift execution of a guilty
person, after a fair trial with presumption of innocence, the possibility of appeal
and of reprieve.
Absolute pacifists are at least consistent, but if
they had their way we'd be in a German empire where innocent people were being
executed all the time with gas-chambers, guillotines and piano-wire, and worse.
So their consistency doesn't offer much of a way out.
Q. But deterrence doesn't work. Most states in the
USA have the death penalty and the murder rate is often higher there than in
states that don't have it.
A. First of all, this is not the USA, a country
with far higher levels of violence(until recently anyway) than we have had for
centuries. Comparisons between the two countries need to be made with great
care. Secondly, no US state really has the death penalty. Even Texas, which
comes closest, still fails to execute the majority of its convicted murderers,
who fester for decades on death row while conscience-stricken liberals drag out
their appeals to the crack of doom.Most states which formally have the penalty
on their books seldom or never apply it.
The 1949 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment
(which was inconclusive on deterrence and most other things) pointed out that
deterrence was very hard to establish. Countries which abolish the death
penalty usually do so after a long period of suspension, or when it is hardly
used, or when the law is unclear. So the murder rates before and after the
formal date of abolition often tell us very little. In Britain, this is also
the case. The death penalty had its teeth drawn in 1957 and the annual number
of executions in the final years of capital punishment was small. So the
penalty's official date of abolition, 1965, is misleading. There's another
feature of this I'll turn to later.
Then there is the difficulty of classifying murder.
The 1957 Act introduced a category of 'manslaughter due to diminished
responsibility' which got you off the death penalty. And so, for the eight
years after 1957, this category of homicide grew quite sharply. Some suspect
that these are cases which would have been murders before 1957. If that is so,
as we shall see, then it makes quite a lot of difference. Since then, it
has not been so important, since the difference between a manslaughter sentence
and the so-called 'life' sentences given for murder is no longer as stark as
the old distinction between a prison sentence or an appointment with Mr Albert
Pierrepoint on the scaffold.
Nowadays, it is suspected (especially by the
relatives of victims who write to me about this complaining) that quite a lot
of cases which would once have been prosecuted as murder are now prosecuted as
manslaughter so as to get a quicker, easier conviction.
So the homicide statistics offer a rather wobbly
idea of what is going on. Skip this if you want, but it is important. The
blurred categories might suggest one thing, while actually saying another. Even
so, here are some samples.In 1956, when the death penalty was still pretty
serious, there were 94 convictions for homicide in England and Wales (all
future figures refer to England and Wales unless otherwise stated). Of these,
11 were for infanticide, 51 for manslaughter and 32 for murder. In 1958, after
the softening of the law, there were 113 homicide convictions - 10
infanticides, 48 manslaughters, 25 for manslaughter with 'diminished
responsibility' and 30 for murder. By 1964 there were 170 homicide convictions
- 12 infanticides, 73 manslaughters, 41 manslaughters due to 'diminished
responsibility' , 44 murders. So, in eight years, a rise in homicide from 94 to
170, quite substantial. But those convicted for murder had risen only from
32 to 44, which hardly seems significant at all. What was really going on here
could only be established by getting out the trial records. But it is at least
possible that, by reclassifying and downgrading certain homicides, the
authorities had made things look a good deal better than they were. Remember,
these are convictions, not totals of offences committed.
Sorry, more statistics here. In 1966, immediately
after formal abolition, there were 254 homicide convictions, 72 of them for
murder. In 1975, 377 homicide convictions, 107 for murder. In 1985, 441
manslaughter convictions, 173 for murder. In 2004, there were 648 homicide
convictions - including 361 murders, 265 ordinary manslaughters and 22
'diminished responsibilities'. Interestingly, more people were convicted of
manslaughter (265) than were charged with it (137) and none of those convicted
of 'diminished responsibility' (22) were charged with it. Many murder
prosecutions failed (759 were proceeded against).
The increasingly important charge of 'attempted
murder' has also run into trouble. In 2004 417 were proceeded against, and 96
convicted. Prosecutions for wounding or other acts endangering life was even
more troublesome, with 7,054 proceeded against and 1,897 convicted. These
figures, again,. are for charges and convictions rather than instances of the
offence, which in both cases is considerably higher. Offences of wounding etc
are now close to the 19,000 mark each year, around triple the total for 30
years ago.
And many of these cases would have been murders, if
we still had the medical techniques of 1965. Again, this makes direct 'before '
and 'after' comparisons, required for a conclusive case for or against
deterrence. hard. And we must also remember the general moral decline that has accompanied
the weakening of the law, and may have been encouraged by it. If you remove the
keystone of an arch, many other stones, often quite far away in the structure,
will loosen or fall.
Finally, a little historical curiosity which I
personally find fascinating. Some American researchers suggest that the sort of
murder which has increased since the death penalty in the USA was effectively
abolished is so-called 'stranger' murder, for example, the killing of a
woman by her rapist , or of a petrol station attendant by the man who has
robbed him. The calculation ( and criminals do calculate) is simple.
"If I leave this person alive, she or he can testify against me, and I
could go to jail for a very long time. If I kill him or her, then there will be
no witness and I will probably get away with it entirely. And even if I am
convicted of murder, all that will happen is jail time." Bang.
So, the death penalty may actually prevent or deter
violent crimes which might otherwise end in an opportunist killing. It is said
that British bank-robbers, before 1957, would search each other for weapons in
case one of them killed, and they all swung - which was then the rule.And Colin
Greenwood, a former police officer and expert on Gun Crime, produces the
following interesting , in fact gripping fact. In both 1948 and 1956, the death
penalty was suspended in this country while Parliament debated its future.
During both periods of suspension, armed and violent offences rose sharply.
After the 1948 attempt to abolish hanging failed ( Clement Attlee and Ernest
Bevin being among the Labour MPs who voted to keep it), they fell sharply.
After 1956, when the law was weakened, they fell back again, but not so
sharply. In 1964, they rose again, and have been doing so ever since.
I think this, taken together, is strong
evidence for a deterrent effect. I am not talking about total deterrence - some
crimes could never be deterred - but partial and significant, potentially
lifesaving. How many innocents have died, or been horribly maimed,
because those who accept the salaries and perks of office are not prepared to
assume its hard duties, and wield the civil sword?And yet opponents of the
death penalty whimper on about the minuscule danger of hanging the wrong
person.
Q. Surely revenge has no part in a civilised
society?
A. How true, and how right. One of the purposes of stern penalties is to prevent revenge by making it clear that the law has real teeth. But a toothless law will lead to the return of revenge among us. The bargain we strike with our rulers is that we give up the right to personal vengeance, and the endless blood-feuds that follow it. And in return, we ask our rulers to wield a stern law, dealing with wrongdoing in such a way as to drive home the moral lesson that no evil deed goes unpunished. It's a simple contract
Civilised, law-governed societies rest on it, but
our political class prefer not to fulfil it because they haven't the moral guts
to take responsibility for sending a murderer to his death. It is this
gutlessness among politicians, more than anything else, that has led to the
abolition of the death penalty. They won't take the responsibility. This cannot
be said often enough. The result is that responsibility is increasingly handed
over to an unofficially armed police force, which shoots people without trial,
appeal or the possibility of reprieve, and often gets it wrong. Watch the numbers
grow.
But that's only the beginning. If ( as I fear)
respect for the criminal justice system continues to dwindle especially among
the abandoned honest poor, we can expect to see an increase of vigilante
private 'justice', even lynch-mobs. What the left-liberals don't seem to grasp
is that if they strangle justice, revenge is what they will get. And then,
rather too late, they will be able to tell the difference between the two. I
wish there was some other way to explain it to them.
*Oh, yes, and the reason why the Cuban Communist
paper is called 'Granma' is that this was the name of the boat in which Castro
and his friends arrived in Cuba for their second attempt to overthrow Batista.
It is a smallish motorcruiser, whose original owner had named it in hour of his
grandmother. I don't think Castro or his comrades ever realised that was
what the name meant.
No comments:
Post a Comment