Not getting sanctimonious about Saddam
Now that the court in Iraq has handed down (sooner than I expected, I have to say) a death sentence on Saddam Hussain over the Dujail massacre, a number of people have piped up to say that he should not be hanged for one reason or another. Umar Lee says that Iraq was a much safer place under his rule than it is now under a weak government backed by US occupation; others say that the death penalty is wrong, whether those on the receiving end are common murderers in the UK or USA or Saddam Hussain (this is Tony Blair's position). A lawyer who advised Saddam's defence team condemned the court as foreign to Iraq's legal tradition, which favours an inquisitorial approach rather than the adversarial one taken by this court.
As I've written elsewhere, I don't favour reintroducing the death penalty in the UK right now. Our own recent history has known countless cases of people convicted of murder on the basis of bad evidence, usually prominently involving confessions beaten out of suspects by police who wanted "results" in order to score points and gain promotion for themselves. Some of these people were mentally disabled and many remained in prison for decades. It has been argued that the fear of executing the wrong person paralyses western judiciaries, and that the risk of the wrong person occasionally being executed is justified in the light of the need for "strong, effective justice".
The problem is that western judiciaries do not show any signs of being paralysed by such scruples, even if the prisons are somewhat overcrowded (though most of the inmates are not convicted of murder or manslaughter). And they are not the product of mistakes honestly made by police and judiciary who are "above reproach" but by undue haste in the pursuit of vengeance and by straightforward corruption. Lest we argue that the lack of the death penalty in the UK means that wrongful murder convictions are more likely as those involved do not have to worry about a wrongful death being on their conscience, we might look at the record of the US legal system. I don't have the space or time to go into it here, but one quote sums up its callous stupidity, and it's from the judge who refused a retrial to Krishna Maharaj, a British businessman now serving life (he was originally sentenced to death) for a double murder in Miami in 1986, despite a welter of evidence suggesting that he is innocent:
Newly discovered evidence which goes only to guilt or innocence is insufficient to warrant relief.
Of course, by this time Maharaj's case was no longer a capital case. That's not the point. The point is that being innocent is not enough to get a retrial in Florida, which is what that statement means.
The problem with the death penalty is not that putting murderers to death is wrong; it's that putting innocent people to death is wrong. It's what murderers do, usually without holding their victims captive for fifteen years or more. I hope that people can make the distinction between the specific case of Saddam Hussain and his henchmen, whose murderous careers are a matter of public record, and opening up the floodgates for many wrongful executions in this country.
