With campaigners trying to get capital punishment debated on the floor of the Commons, we should remind ourselves how staggeringly easy it is to dismantle their argument.
Right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes has managed to drag the issue into the silly-season spotlight via the government's new e-petition system, which guarantees a debate in the Commons if you can get 100,000 signatures.
I neither support capital punishment nor have much regard for the arguments of those who do, but this seems a healthy and rewarding endeavour. Most people in this country do support executions but it remains a non-issue in Westminster. It seems entirely right that the petition should get the requisite signatures and trigger a Commons debate. Quite where it would go from there, given our international treaty obligations and membership of the European Union, is pretty obvious: nowhere.
Guido's petition demands that "the Ministry of Justice… map out the necessary legislative steps which will be required to restore the death penalty for the murder of children and police officers when killed in the line of duty".
The decision to call for executions only in certain murder cases is page one, chapter one, of the gradualist political method, but it does not alter the fact that pro-death penalty arguments of any sort can be dismantled with one sentence: the death penalty does not reduce crime. By the time you demonstrate that, and it is readily demonstrable, you realise that demands for the death penalty say considerable more about the personality of people who make them than they do about criminal justice.
Source: Ian Dunt, politics.co.uk, August 1, 2011
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