Death Penalty Reconsidered

David Aikman

Amnesty International is an international human rights organization that draws attention on a regular basis to the plight of political prisoners in various countries of the world. But for many years it has had a standing campaign to abolish the death penalty.

Proponents of the death penalty have traditionally argued that it is needed by society to provide retributive justice and to grant some sort of emotional “closure” for the families of murder victims. Opponents argue that it is inherently barbaric, that it is an irreversible punishment if the executed person turns out to be innocent, and that it doesn’t deter murder at all. Proponents tend to regard Amnesty International as an international meddling group determined to impose do-good liberalism on everyone else. Opponents regard it as a champion of global humanity, civilization, and progress.

What is sometimes lost in the debate, however, is that Amnesty International does a good job of documenting global executions each year and thus, in a neutral way, of keeping track of the global phenomenon of the death penalty. Its most recent report, published a few days ago, produced the surprising discovery that death penalties world-wide declined by 25 percent in 2006. Some 1,591 people were put to death, compared with 2,148 in 2005. On closer examination, the figures are very revealing. China, once again, is the world’s most prolific executioner of prisoners by far, putting to death at least 1,010 prisoners in 2006. Amnesty International each year cautions that the real figure of Chinese executions is probably much higher, because the actual number is a state secret. More startling is the fact that more than 91 percent of all the world’s executions are carried out in a mere six countries: China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, and the US. In 2006 the US executed 53 prisoners, down from 60 the previous year. It’s an interesting question what it is about retributive justice that unites countries as disparate—and sometimes as hostile to each other—as China, Sudan, and the US.

According to Amnesty International, the overall global trend is an increase in the number of states that have ended executions of criminals. In 2006, the Philippines became the 126th nation that ended capital punishment. While 69 nations still retain the death penalty, fewer than half of these still carry out executions. Surprisingly Iraq, which publicly—and in the views of some—brutally executed a very high-profile prisoner, Saddam Hussein, at the end of 2006, has stated its intention to end the death penalty. So has China.

As for the US, though twelve states have abolished the death penalty for many years, others show no signs of ending it. Texas has executed the most number of criminals of any state, a total of 392 since 1976. The US as a whole is one of the few countries in the world which continues to execute prisoners who were not 18 years old at the time of their crimes. The US and Iran have together more prisoners who were not 18 when they committed a crime than the other top “executing” countries together.

It’s an interesting thought.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

2 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Global Culture, Society, David Aikman, Fri 04 May 2007