A hanging question
Capital punishment is one of the most vexed moral issues confronting society - and it's the hardest cases that make it so.
I meant to blog on this last week, when the issue was in the news (and here )and on the opinion pages (and here), but our computer system crashed. Still, the issues haven't gone away over the weekend.
The Australian Catholic Church revived the debate by calling on the Federal Government to resist the death penalty everywhere and under all circumstances, including the three Bali bombers who face an Indonesian firing squad at the end of the month. It was also wrong to execute Iraqi tyrant and mass murderer Saddam Hussein.
I am interested in this today as a moral issue, not a prudential one. By prudential, I mean such questions as does the death penalty really deter, is it more or less economic than other solutions (and how important a consideration is the economic one anyway?), how much can we trust the justice system to get it right (has the near-certainty of DNA testing made the death penalty more viable?) and a myriad other questions. Underlying those is the question, have we the right, or even the obligation, judicially to end someone's life?
The church pointed out that it was inconsistent, even hypocritical, to intervene on behalf of Australians facing the death penalty abroad while supporting capital punishment for non-citizens, such as Saddam and the Bali bombers.
But look at the picture above. I find it disturbing - even though Saddam was one of history's cruellest and most murderous tyrants who took others' lives without compunction. In hanging him, did the executioners descend to something approaching moral equivalence, as the church argues?
The last Australian state to remove the death penalty was New South Wales in 1985 for treason. Few people advocate its return here, but many believe the Bali bombers deserve death for murdering more than 200 people in 2002.
The biblical understanding stems from the first book of the Tanach. Genesis 9:6 says: "Whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.'' This instruction, because it requires human organisation, is often viewed as the biblical justification not just for the death penalty but for human government.
Much Tanach law has been superceded in Christ, the church believes, but some of the teachings that predate Moses remain including - arguably - this one.
In the New Testament, Jesus refined the Mosaic code - ``You have heard that it was said `an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth' but I say to you ... whoever slaps you on your right cheek turn to him the other also'' - but advocates of capital punishment say this applies to individuals, not governments.
Opponents say all human life is the gift of God and therefore sacred, and no one has the right to remove it, whether tyrants or criminals who murder or the judicial system that catches them. But both advocates and opponents can find biblical justification for their position, and it is a subject of debate within Judaism and Islam also.
Many Muslim states apply capital punishment for what Westerners see as minor offences or even issues of individual freedom, such as the freedom to leave the Islamic religion. But there are many voices within Islam seeking to reinterpret the texts in a modern context.
As with many moral issues, it is "easier" if one can see it in terms of absolutes - the death penalty is always wrong (as the Roman Catholic church asserts), or it should be the default punishment for anyone who takes another's life. But for most people, absolutes fail to capture something important; actual cases so often introduce shades of gray.
As Melbourne priest and former Pentridge Prison chaplain Peter Norden told me last week, it is the hardest cases that test the principle. Few Australians think foolish young drug runners such as Scott Rush - one of the six members of the Bali nine who have been sentenced to death in Indonesia - deserve to die. But calculating and unrepentant mass murderers such as Amrozi are hardly in the same category - or are they?
I have struggled with this issue for decades. In theory, I believe there are some crimes so appalling that to spare the perpetrators would seem to trivialise what they did. Israel's execution of Adolf Eichmann is a notorious example I referred to last week. And if that's right, then the vexed question is where do we draw the line? Hitler? Amrozi? Port Arthur killer Martin Bryant, who murdered 35 people in 1996?
But I find something deeply abhorrent, even chilling, in the idea of taking a man (it's usually men) from a cell to end his life, deliberately and dispassionately. If I could not act as executioner, is it hypocritical to want someone else to serve in that role? Or is such opposition simply a luxury available only to people who live in a civilised nation under the rule of law? But then, going a level deeper, even if it is a self-serving luxury, shouldn't that be what every society should aspire to? Isn't that a central aspect of civilisation?
What do you think? How do you define the issues, and sort out the right and wrong of the death penalty? Could you ever be the executioner? Both believers and non-believers can argue either case, so how has your belief or lack of it affected your reasoning?
http://blogs.theage.com.au/thereligiouswrite/archives/2008/01/a_hanging_quest.html
Topic: A hanging question (Read 832 times)