Life is easier now on death row as the system gets a lethal injection

I AM the bearer of good news. About 8,000 people were executed last year around the world. How is that good news, you might ask? And is the death penalty an appropriate topic of discussion during the season of goodwill?

In my defence, Saint Stephen was the first Christian martyr, stoned to death for speaking “blasphemous words against Moses and against God”.

But back to my good news. The estimate of 8,000 dead represents a significant fall from the rates being reported earlier this decade. The confirmed number of executions worldwide, according to Amnesty, was much lower — around 1,600. But China, by far the most ruthless exponent of capital punishment, only admits to a tiny fraction of the true number it executes. Recently, sickeningly, fleets of “death vans” — vehicles equipped with the necessary equipment for lethal jabs — have been deployed to make it easier for rural Chinese communities to dispose of criminals.

Amnesty likes to quote another statistic, specifically that just six countries — China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan and, you guessed it, the United States — account for more than 90% of the confirmed figure of worldwide executions.

Perhaps it suits Amnesty to present figures in this way, but it obscures the fact that China probably executes well over 100 times more people than the USA.

The more important point, though, is not the number of executions, which fluctuates somewhat year to year, but the number of countries that carry out executions. This total has fallen steadily from 40 a decade ago to just 25 last year. Since 1985, 55 countries have stopped using the death penalty or banned it outright. The last execution in Ireland was in 1954; in the North, in 1961.

In Europe, where abolition of capital punishment is a condition of both EU and Council of Europe membership, Belarus is the only country that still uses it. Even in Africa, just four countries carried out the death penalty last year. Only Asia and the Middle East seem largely untouched by the global trend.

Still, for most of us on this side of the Atlantic, the fact that a western democracy still legally takes the lives of its own citizens is profoundly disturbing. America, rightly, is judged by a higher standard than Pakistan, Sudan or, in particular, Iran where, incidentally, the severest penalty of all is handed down for the ‘crime’ of having sex outside marriage.

But my reserves of good news are not exhausted quite yet. In the US, the tide does appear to be turning very, very slowly in the abolitionists’ direction. American executions dropped to a 13-year low this year as a de facto moratorium took hold in the wake of the Supreme Court’s examination of lethal injection procedures. The 42 executions this year occurred in just 10 states and two-thirds took place in a single state, Texas.

The review of the preferred method of capital punishment was prompted by the case of Angel Diaz who was executed by lethal injection in Florida.

The three-drug cocktail is supposed first to induce unconsciousness, then to prevent breathing, and finally to stop the heart. But in Diaz’s case, he writhed and gagged so much they had to administer a second dose. It took 34 agonising minutes for him to die.

The court has not suspended capital punishment itself; only the most common method of applying it. If it rules that lethal injection represents “cruel and unusual punishment”, and is thus unconstitutional, states can presumably come up with some different ones. But if injections are outlawed, then a majority of Americans might prefer life imprisonment without parole rather than returning to the electric chair, firing squad or gas chamber.

For many Americans, the death penalty holds a deep emotional appeal as an expression of society’s ultimate outrage. Many cite Genesis 9:6: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

Opponents of capital punishment tend to respond by saying that juries, being human, make mistakes. If you find you have jailed the wrong man, you can free and compensate him. If you have executed him, however, it is a bit late for that.

Since 1973, well in excess of 100 Americans have been released from death row because of doubts about their guilt. Of the 8,000 sentenced to death between 1973 and 2005, more than a quarter had their sentence or conviction overturned. But in no case has it been legally proven — for example, with DNA evidence — that an innocent person has been executed.

At the same time, the notion that executions save lives by deterring potential murderers is steadily being undermined. A comparison of murder rates in jurisdictions with and without capital punishment offers no support for the notion of deterrence. There are nearly 50% more murders per head in states with the death penalty than in those without it.

The murder rate in the US as a whole, moreover, is far higher than in Europe, where — Belarus aside — capital punishment is a thing of the past.

What’s more, the chance of being executed in America is so remote that it cannot plausibly be a significant deterrent. Even if you are on death row — a fate more than 99% of murderers escape — the chance of being put to death in any given year is only about 2%. Members of drugs gangs run a higher risk of being murdered. For them, death row would be safer than the street.

And then there are the 30% of murders in America which remain unsolved. The states spend millions of dollars putting a handful of murderers to death while detection is under-financed and thousands of murderers walk free.

THOSE close to a murder victim might want the perpetrator to die, but you’ve got to catch him first. Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland, says that, but for the death penalty, his state would have been $20 million richer since capital punishment was revived in the 1970s. That money would have paid for 500 extra policemen for a year, or provided drug treatment for 10,000 addicts, he says.

Asked by pollsters whether they think murderers should be put to death, two-thirds of Americans still say ‘yes’. Yet, if asked to choose between the death penalty and a life sentence with no chance of parole, they are evenly divided. Life that means life is a relatively new concept. Until quite recently, juries used to worry that if they did not send the man in the dock to his death, he would be freed to kill again after a few years.

But America is nothing if it is not a capitalist society. Those on death row must have lawyers arguing expensively about their fate, sometimes for a decade or more. The system of appeals has grown more protracted because of fears that innocent people may be executed. Few would argue that such safeguards are not needed, but their steep cost gives abolitionists a new line of attack. Perhaps it’s not so surprising then that America’s ardour for executions has declined. Not only are fewer prisoners on death row actually being executed. From 300 in 1996, the number of new death sentences handed down has dropped by two-thirds.

Good news indeed.