[Deathpenalty]death penalty news --- USA

[Joerg Sommer]

death penalty news

March 2, 2005


USA:

An end to killing kids

America’s Supreme Court has abolished the death penalty for those under 18 
when they committed their crimes. It is just another nibble at the edge of 
still-popular capital punishment—but does it show that America can 
sometimes be swayed by world opinion?

Which country seems the odd one out in this list: China, Congo, Iran, 
Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United States? These eight 
countries are the only ones in the world that have executed children under 
18 since 1990. Now, at last, the world’s self-proclaimed beacon of freedom 
will be able to take itself off the list. On Tuesday March 1st, America’s 
Supreme Court ruled, by five votes to four, that putting to death those who 
were minors at the time of their crimes is unconstitutional.

Of course, the death penalty will remain in place for convicted murderers 
in America. Indeed, it remains popular—two-thirds of Americans support it 
(though this number drops to half when life imprisonment without parole is 
offered as an alternative). Despite this week’s ruling, America is clearly 
still out of step with most of the countries it considers its friends.

More than half of the world’s countries have either abolished the death 
penalty for normal crimes or have imposed moratoriums, according to Amnesty 
International, a non-governmental organisation that campaigns against 
capital punishment. These include all but two countries in Europe and 
Central Asia (Belarus and Uzbekistan), as well as both of America’s 
neighbours, Canada and Mexico, and like-minded countries such as Australia 
and New Zealand. Among large democracies, only India, South Korea and Japan 
still practise capital punishment. But it is rare in those places. 
According to Amnesty, in 2003, 84% of the world’s known executions took 
place in just four countries: China, Iran, Vietnam and America.

Though America’s polls do not show it, the tide may be creeping against the 
death penalty. One reason to think it will not last forever is that in most 
of the countries where it has been abolished, a majority of the public 
remained in favour of keeping it at the time. In most cases, crime rates 
failed to shoot up after abolition—thus putting paid to the argument for 
execution as deterrence—and populations came to believe that judicial 
killing was wrong under any circumstances. Only one formerly abolitionist 
country has resumed executions—the Philippines—though it has since 
suspended them again.

A second trend is the gradual nibbling away at the death penalty within 
America itself. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that most Americans now 
regarded the mentally retarded as “categorically less culpable than the 
average criminal”, and banned executing them. Ten years earlier, Bill 
Clinton, then a presidential candidate, had burnished his law-and-order 
credentials by letting the execution of a retarded man go ahead in 
Arkansas, where he was governor. But more recently, another governor with a 
national profile, George Ryan of Illinois, put a moratorium on his state’s 
use of the death penalty, and later granted clemency to all prisoners on 
death row. He was concerned about the number of inmates exonerated by DNA 
evidence after already having been sentenced to die.

A third trend against the death penalty in America is the increasing 
attention paid to moral views elsewhere. In the Supreme Court’s majority 
opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court acknowledged “the 
overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death 
penalty”. While the court explicitly said that foreign opinions, legal or 
moral, are not binding in American law, they were nonetheless “respected 
and significant confirmation” for Tuesday’s ruling. Antonin Scalia, the 
court’s conservative stalwart, stoutly rejected any such notion.
	
Conservatives are bound to be furious when they feel that more liberal 
societies’ values are being foisted on a fundamentally different America

But it is not the first such case. In the 2002 ruling in Lawrence v Texas, 
the Supreme Court struck down a state statute forbidding private homosexual 
conduct. The court ruled that: “Where a case’s foundations have sustained 
serious erosion, criticism from other sources is of greater 
significance
[T]o the extent Bowers [a previous case that had upheld the 
anti-sodomy law] relied on values shared with a wider civilization, the 
case’s reasoning and holding have been rejected by the European Court of 
Human Rights, and other nations have taken action consistent with an 
affirmation of the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in 
intimate, consensual conduct.”

In other words, courts have previously cited other countries, or sometimes 
pre-American traditions, in making their case. The anti-sodomy Bowers 
decision had argued that prohibitions on homosexuality went back to 
biblical times from which much of Western ethics and morality is drawn. The 
Lawrence decision essentially replied that shared tradition is shared 
tradition, and that if the rest of the Judeo-Christian world is changing, 
America should not be blind to it. But conservatives are bound to be 
furious when they feel that more liberal societies’ values are being 
foisted on a fundamentally different America.

The death penalty is far from dead in America. The capture last weekend in 
Kansas of a serial murderer who had taunted his victims’ families and the 
police for decades will remind Americans that sometimes evil is just evil. 
“Victims-rights” groups remain potent. And anyway America remains happy to 
swim against the Western cultural mainstream in a host of areas. At a 
United Nations conference this week on women’s rights and health, for 
instance, the American delegation insisted that any declaration explicitly 
rule out the creation of “new international human rights”, a reference to a 
putative right to abortion.

America may be happy to differ sharply from the world’s other democracies 
on some moral and ethical issues, and this often irritates its closest 
friends. But this week’s death-penalty ruling seems to show that even a 
superpower can sometimes be swayed, even if just a bit.

(source: Economist, UK)