Stephen Pollard changed from an
opponent to a supporter of the death penalty, after learning about Saddam
Hussein being sentenced to death and executed on December 30, 2006. These two
articles will tell you why.
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Stephen Pollard
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PAGE TITLE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
ARTICLE TITLE: This is the week I changed my mind about hanging
DATE: Sunday 21
December 2003
AUTHOR: Stephen
Pollard
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Stephen Pollard (born c.
1965) is a British author and journalist who is currently editor of The
Jewish Chronicle. He is a former Chairman of the European Institute for the
Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and a former president of the Centre for the
New Europe, a free-market think tank based in Brussels. He has written columns
for several publications, including The Times and the Daily Mail,
and also has also maintained a blog. Pollard is an alumnus of John Lyon School
and Mansfield College, Oxford.
I
have a question for Tony Blair, for Jack Straw, and for anyone else who says
that they oppose the death penalty for murderers such as Ian Huntley but are,
none the less, prepared to see Saddam hang. It is a very simple question, made
up of just three letters. Why?
All
my adult life I have opposed the death penalty. My reasons are standard,
shared, I am sure, by the vast majority of those who oppose capital punishment.
Of all of them, one stands out: better that 99 guilty men should go free than
that one innocent man should be killed. That is, of course, a practical rather
than a moral objection, but I have also had a principled objection to the idea
of the state taking a life when it sees fit. War, certainly, presents a
different circumstance, when there is simply no choice but for the state to
kill in order to survive. But it is impossible to imagine how, in response to
criminal behaviour, life imprisonment rather than execution would put at risk a
country's very existence.
So
if last week had been a normal week, my reaction to the conviction of Ian
Huntley would have been that he should be locked up for ever - that, as David
Blunkett is now attempting to ensure, "life means life". And I would
have had very little concern for the conditions in which he was kept - other,
that is, than that they should not be comfortable.
But
it was not a normal week. By the end of it, I had come to realise that I can
see no reason, either moral or practical, why Ian Huntley should not be
executed - or why other murderers, too, should not be killed.
Saddam
Hussein's capture leads to no other conclusion. It is one thing to argue that
taking life is always immoral. Such an absolutist view may be wrong-headed -
self defence, by both states and individuals, is the most obvious refutation -
but those who argue that Saddam should be punished not through execution but by
life imprisonment have at least the virtue of intellectual consistency.
Those,
however, such as the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, who say that
they oppose the death penalty (indeed, as Mr Straw put it on Monday, they
continue to "campaign hard to try to extend the abolition of the death
penalty") but that in this instance they are prepared to acquiesce in what
they must consider to be state-sponsored, judicial murder have no such virtue.
Their position is incoherent, unprincipled, and plain wrong. If they believe
that it is wrong for the state to punish murderers by execution - a perfectly
valid position - then it is, well, wrong. It is not wrong in Britain but right
in Iraq or wrong in California but right in Texas.
They
explain their position - that it is all right to hang Saddam, but not to hang
Huntley - with a decidedly specious argument. According to Mr Blair, "it
is for them [the Iraqis] to determine what penalties there may be". Aha!
Now we are getting to the nub of the issue: Iraqis are barbarians of whom we
can expect no better - a view which has been implicit in the comments of those
who say that Saddam must be tried by an international, rather than Iraqi,
court. Such a stance, which seems at first instance to be respectful of Iraqi
feelings, turns out on further examination to be deeply patronising.
Either
capital punishment is immoral or it isn't. By refusing to condemn any potential
execution of Saddam, Messrs Blair and Straw and the others who have fallen into
line behind them are, from their perspective on capital punishment, supporting
a grotesquely immoral act. They are also exposing the deep flaws in their
opposition to the death penalty at home. If it is wrong to execute Ian Huntley,
it is wrong to execute Saddam. But that works in reverse, too. If, as the Prime
Minister and Foreign Secretary appear to believe, it is morally acceptable to
kill Saddam, how can it be any less so to kill Ian Huntley? It is a perverted
moral calculus which holds that murdering two children is somehow more
acceptable than murdering 300,000.
I
have never been an absolutist in my opposition to ending human life. Since I
accept that there are times when it is right to kill, in the last week I have
had to ask myself an unsettling question: when could there be a clearer-cut
example of living, breathing evil, and when could the extermination of that
evil be more justified? As I watched the wonderful pictures of Saddam's humiliation,
I could not - nor can I still - think of a single reason why he should not be
executed. I am left with only one response, which is that Saddam should indeed
be put to death - after due process.
Much
as I have tried to escape this conclusion, I cannot: there are no sensible
grounds on which one can argue that it is morally right to execute Saddam but
not Ian Huntley. Anyone who accepts that Saddam should be killed must also
accept the case for capital punishment more generally. We can argue about details
- to which forms of murder it should apply, and in what circumstances - but the
principle is clear. Accept the moral validity of executing Saddam and you must
accept it for executing Huntley - and, indeed, anyone convicted of cold-blooded
and deliberate murder.
The
imprisonment of Saddam has made me realise that, far from opposing the death
penalty, I can see no moral alternative to it. As for the idea that it is
better that 99 guilty men go free than one innocent man is hanged, the response
of one visiting member of the Chinese judiciary to that statement is perhaps
the most pertinent observation: "Better for whom?"
• Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the
Centre for the New Europe in Brussels. Jenny McCartney returns next week.
PAGE TITLE: http://www.express.co.uk/
ARTICLE
TITLE:
Why bringing back hanging is the right thing to do
DATE: Saturday
June 25, 2011
AUTHOR: Stephen
Pollard
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Stephen Pollard (born c.
1965) is a British author and journalist who is currently editor of The
Jewish Chronicle. He is a former Chairman of the European Institute for the
Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and a former president of the Centre for the
New Europe, a free-market think tank based in Brussels. He has written columns
for several publications, including The Times and the Daily Mail,
and also has also maintained a blog. Pollard is an alumnus of John Lyon School
and Mansfield College, Oxford.
LET me ask you a blunt question. Do
you think Levi Bellfield, the murderer of Milly Dowler and two other young
women, should still be alive?
My answer is no. Milly’s sister Gemma
agrees, observing: “Justice is an eye for an eye, you should pay a life for a
life. In my eyes no real justice has been done.”
If the opinion polls are right, that view is shared by roughly half the population.
A poll in September 2010 found that 51 per cent supported reinstating the death penalty for murder, compared with 37 per cent who oppose it.
A few years ago I’d have been with that 37 per cent. I was opposed to capital punishment.
Of all the arguments against, one mattered most: better that 99 guilty men should go free than that one innocent man should be killed.
So my view was that murderers should be locked up but not executed. Keep them in spartan conditions.
Make sure life really means life. And do everything possible to ensure that they spend the rest of their lives in misery.
Then something happened which changed my mind. In December 2006 Saddam Hussein was hanged in Iraq.
Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone could disagree with his execution.
There was no doubt about his guilt. He had murdered hundreds of thousands by deliberate actions, some in cold blood.
He expressed no remorse. He was as close to pure evil as any man can get.
To me the question wasn’t whether he
should have been executed. It was whether there were any valid reasons not to
kill him. And there were none.
But either capital punishment is immoral or it isn’t. It can’t be immoral occasionally. And if it was right that Saddam was hanged then it’s clearly not an issue of principle.
In which case why Saddam and not Ian Huntley? Or Levi Bellfield? After all, who could fail to be moved by the words of Milly Dowler’s mother Sally outside court yesterday?
“The lengths to protect his human rights have seemed so unfair compared to what we as a family have had to endure. I hope that whilst he is in prison he is treated with the same brutality he dealt out to his victim and that his life is a living hell.”
This is where so much of the opposition to the death penalty falls apart.
When Saddam was executed the condemnations were deafening in their silence.
With very few – entirely honourable – exceptions there was not a word of criticism of the Iraqi decision to hang him.
But if, as opponents of capital punishment believe, it is immoral to execute Ian Huntley, Ian Brady or any other killer, it was surely just as immoral to execute Saddam – or Martin Bormann, Hermann Göring and other Nazis who were convicted at Nuremburg.
Yet when Saddam was executed there was not a word of condemnation from the Labour government.
But to a man and woman its members oppose the death penalty here. It is a perverted moral calculus which holds that a death sentence is acceptable if there are hundreds of thousands of murder victims but unacceptable if there are only a few.
We can argue about the details – to which forms of murder the death penalty should apply and in what circumstances – but the principle is clear. That is why Levi Bellfield should hang.
Thank God it is impossible for most of us to have any real understanding of what the through over the past nine years.
To lose a child in any circumstances is an unimaginable nightmare. To lose a daughter in the way that Milly was taken is too painful to think about.
No normal human being could follow Bellfield’s trial without being stunned by the gut-wrenching tragedy suffered by the Dowlers and enraged by the depravity of her murderer.
As if that was not enough suffering for them to endure, Bellfield put them through further trauma at the trial by refusing to admit his guilt and attempting to switch the blame for Milly’s death to her father Bob Dowler.
Which of us could endure our every foible being exposed and picked over with forensic questioning from a barrister?
We all have areas of our life which are intensely private. Exposure alone would be bad enough, allowing everyone else to pick over and comment on.
But exposure as part of an attempt by your daughter’s murderer to insinuate that you, in fact, are the real cause of her death?
Like so much else in this terrible story that must have been unendurable.
AS VICTIMS’ Commissioner Louise Casey said yesterday: “No one in this country can think what happened to them in that courtroom was right.”
The Dowlers’ private lives were torn to shreds at the Old Bailey. Milly’s mother Sally and her sister Gemma, 25, collapsed, unable to bear it any longer as the verdict was returned.
Yes, the legal process which allowed that to happen must be examined. But one man was responsible for their suffering, not the legal system.
It speaks volumes about Bellfield that he thought nothing of letting his victim’s family go through hell in the witness box.
So push me for a reason why he should not be executed and I struggle. All I can come up with is that idea of his remaining life being a “living hell” as Mrs Dowler put it.
But from what we know about the criminal justice system the idea of life meaning life is unlikely.
Who would bet against some human rights organisation campaigning for his release in 20 years’ time?
As for the idea that it is better that 99 guilty men go free than one innocent man is hanged: better for whom?
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