Nick Cohen
Long ago in 1992, the aides of Bill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, knew all
about the inability of the governor of Arkansas to keep it in his trousers. The
public was let in on the secret when Clinton’s former mistress, a nightclub
singer of the type boys’ mothers once warned were nothing but trouble,
announced their relationship.
Clinton lied. The mistress produced tapes of
their intimate conversations. The Clinton camp’s fallback position that
“everyone lies about sex” did not play well. Everyone may lie, but few want to
be lied to, particularly when the liar is a presidential candidate asking for
their trust.
Fortunately for Clinton, Arkansas had a convict
called Ricky Ray Rector on death row.
He had murdered a police officer and
turned his gun on himself. Somehow he survived and Clinton flew back home to
ensure his execution went ahead without hindrance, even though Rector was so
brain damaged he could not have understood the charges against him.
I don’t think Christopher Hitchens ever lost the anger he felt at the
spectacle of a white “progressive” from a state in the old Confederacy
executing a black man to save his career. But smart political operators
appreciated that Clinton’s “positioning” helped him become America’s 42nd
president.
The 1990s seem like history now. Like an inmate
on death row, the American way of death has been taking a slow journey towards
its own extinction. “We are in the middle of a sea change,” Robert Dunham of
the US Death Penalty Information Center told me. The number of new death sentences
imposed fell sharply in 2015. Executions dropped to their lowest levels in 24
years. All the signs are pointing the same way.
Dunham turned from a lawyer into an activist
when he was doing pro bono work. He found a poor Hispanic, who was not so different
from Clinton’s Rector. The man had a severe mental disability and could not
understand the case against him.
His lawyer could not be bothered to fight
because, like Clinton, he was running for office. Dunham learned then that one
of the best arguments against the death penalty was that poor clients got
terrible advocates.
He never thought he would see abolition in his
lifetime, but juries are refusing to pass death sentences and states are
overturning old laws.
You don’t win arguments until the other side
concedes ground. The biggest hint that change is coming is the second thoughts
of Republicans. It turns out that there are strong conservative arguments against the death penalty. Libertarians
ask: what greater instance of big government can there be than the state taking
a citizen’s life?
As DNA evidence has shown that many of the
executed were innocent, Christian conservatives have wondered how they can
square opposition to abortion with support for the death penalty.
I have never been sure of how I would answer the
question: what would you want to happen to the murderer of someone you loved?
The answer that it is for society to find justice rather than the individual to
demand vengeance feels bloodless.
I felt no need to protest at the execution of
Saddam Hussein. The genocide of the Kurds seemed justification enough. And I
doubt I would have taken to the barricades to save Fred and Rosemary West.
Long experience of state-mandated killing has
allowed American abolitionists to give an answer to victims that does not sound
like the platitutes of a passionless bureaucrat reading from a script.
The protracted, expensive process of appeals
offers no closure, they say. The killer almost supplants the victim as defence
lawyers spend years finding reasons to exonerate him. Better to lock him away
and leave him to rot.
It is sometimes hard to believe in the liberal
idea of progress, but now so many countries have abolished the death penalty,
the only major killers left now are China, where the state uses execution to
maintain the power of the communist elite, and Saudi Arabia and Iran where
Koranic punishments perform a similar function for clerical elites. The US was
once with them. Now it appears to be saying that it does not wish to keep such
foul company.
One can become equally optimistic by looking at
Britain. After Tony Blair and Michael Howard saw how successfully Clinton and
his Republican rivals had exploited fears of crime, they all but doubled the
prison population.
Chris Grayling, the last justice secretary,
followed their lead. He was the greyest macho man you could ever meet, and the
most unmanly too, because he lacked the courage to examine the consequences of
his actions. He banned prisoners from receiving books and presided over a
chaotic prison system disfigured by
violence.
Even here, however, his successor, Michael Gove,
is astonishing those who assumed he was a caricature Tory by undoing Grayling’s
bad work and promising the first sustained attempt in decades to cut the prison
population.
Before we get too cheerful, I should say that
progress dies without political leadership . If I were Gove, I’d worry about
David Cameron. Imagine one convict released early and committing a terrible
offence; the right of the Conservative party demanding tough measures and their
allies in the press in full cry. Would Cameron have the guts to back him?
As for the US, let us see if progress survives
the 2016 election. Donald Trump is already calling for mandatory death
sentences for the killers of police
officers. If he
or another rightwing republican nominee goes hard on crime, don’t assume the
Democratic candidate would fight back. With the number of executions falling
and a minority of Republicans supporting abolition, you would not need to be an
exceptionally brave politician to fight, I grant you. But the democratic
candidate is Bill Clinton’s wife. And no, thank you, it is not sexist to
emphasise her marriage, and not only because her political career piggybacked
on her husband’s.
Hillary Clinton has all his slippery willingness to say or
do anything that might win an election or get herself out of a difficulty. The
small stand she needs to take to encourage a growing movement against capital
punishment is add her influential voice. She cannot do it.
When questioned in October, she left herself
with the “political space” to make a smart
manoeuvre. She said she knew the poor and the black suffered most, but for all
that, she wanted to keep the death penalty for “egregious cases”.
The 1990s was long ago, I said. Not so long ago,
we may soon find.
No comments:
Post a Comment