Last night's drama, The Execution of Gary Glitter, was very thought provoking and confimed in my mind all the reasons why I am against the reintroduction of the death penalty.
What I am about to say may make me most unpopular but as someone who encountered a similar character as a child, I feel qualified to say what I think.
As horrible as child sexual abuse is, does it really justify the barbaric execution of a person by the state? I don't believe it does. If I was a child who suffered at the hands of a man like this, I would never recover from the experience if I knew he had been murdered because of what he did to me. As a parent, I'd like to think I'd feel the same.
If, however, my child was murdered, or someone close to me was murdered, then I still could not support the death penalty for the person who committed this most henious of crimes.
Murder is wrong. It doesn't make it right because the state does it. It is about revenge and not about justice. An eye for an eye is Old Testament and it has no place in a modern society.
That said, I do think things are well out of balance at present. When the death penalty was abolished, those against its abolition were appeased by the introduction of a life sentence in prison. That is what has gone wrong. People who commit murder today can expect to serve about 10 - 12 years in comfort at the expense of the state. Life in prison should mean one's whole life in prison until death without any chance of parole and every day should be as awful as it can be so that the offender has long, hard days, for the rest of their life, to reflect on the life they stole. Only then will people begin to stop and think before killing other human beings. The murder rate is high because there is currently NO deterrent.
Before the EU stuck it's nose into our criminal justice system, we also had the age of responsibility which, if I recall correctly, was 10 years old. After the Jamie Bulger killing, the boys who murdered him were given far more sympathy than the parents of that poor child. They now have freedom and new identities. That was a difficult case but on balance, children especially must know that there is a line in the sand that cannot ever be crossed and in doing so, one's life and freedom is forfeited to a life in prison.
I don't know how the Bulger family feels about the death penalty but if it had been my child, I would want a wretched prison system and for those two boys to live a very, very, long time knowing that they would suffer every single day.
Finally, when we had the death penalty too many innocent people were murdered by the state. Even though today we have better detection methods and DNA, I would still say that science is not infallable and 10 deserved deaths would not justify one innocent life lost.