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Down with the Death Penalty
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The warrior and the executioner do similar jobs. Both kill the enemies of the state. But there the similarity ends. From time immemorial the warrior has been feted and honoured. The public executioner, by contrast, has always had to lurk in the shadows, working anonymously or for a pittance. There is no glory in what he does.
That sense of discomfort and shame is why a growing number of countries have washed their hands off judicial execution. Today nearly all western democracies, as well as dozens of other countries, have abandoned capital punishment. Most of the countries, which still use it with much frequency, such as China or Iran, are authoritarian states without independent legal systems.
The single most defiant – and most notable – exception to this trend is the United States. To the irritation of many of its allies, the American government regularly defends the death penalty in international forums, reflecting widespread support for capital punishment at home. Too often, death-penalty opponents have reacted to America's stubborn exceptionalism on this issue with knee-jerk condemnation, or despair. Instead they should relish the chance to convert the world's most vigorous democracy to a saner policy. For they have a better case.
Three basic arguments are made for the death penalty: that it deters others, saves innocent lives by ensuring that murderers can never kill again, and inflicts on them the punishment they deserve. The first two, utilitarian arguments, do not stand up to scrutiny, while the moral claim for retribution, although naturally more difficult to refute, can be answered.
Despite voluminous academic studies of American executions and crime rates, there is no solid evidence that the death penalty is any more effective at deterring murder than long terms of imprisonment. This seems counter-intuitive. Surely death must deter someone. But the kinds of people who kill are rarely equipped, or in a proper emotional state, to make fine calculations about the consequences. Moreover, even for those who are, decades of imprisonment may be as great a deterrent as the remote prospect of execution. Although European countries have abolished the death penalty, their rates of violent crime have risen more slowly than crime overall. Indeed, their murder rates remain far below America's.
It is indisputable that executing a murderer guarantees that he cannot kill again, and this argument once carried considerable weight in societies that could not afford to imprison offenders for long periods. But today most countries, and especially America, can afford this. Opinion polls show that support for the death penalty among Americans drops sharply when life imprisonment without parole is the alternative. Executions are not needed to protect the public.
Against the dubious benefits of capital punishment must be weighed its undoubted drawbacks. It is a dangerous power to give any government, and has been grossly abused by many to kill political opponents and other inconvenient people under the colour of law. Even America, with all its legal guarantees and complex system of appeals, has not been able to apply it fairly or consistently. Worst of all, it is irrevocable. Mistakes can never be rectified. America, like all countries, which use the death penalty, has executed innocents. This is too high a price to pay for an unnecessary punishment.
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Where does this leave retribution? Some crimes are so heinous that a societal cost-benefit analysis hardly appears relevant. Death alone seems sufficient. And yet, as many relatives of murder victims have discovered, real retribution can never be achieved. For example, the only way to re pay fully those who have committed multiple murder, or killed in a ghastly way, would be to torture them physically in turn, or to strive to make them endure repeatedly the torments of death. Modern societies have rightly turned away from such practices as barbaric, tempering their demands for retribution in recognition that tit-for-tat vengeance is beyond the reach of human justice. That is where the death penalty, too, belongs.
In 1976, after short lull, the court allowed executions to proceed again under redrafted state statutes. Since then it has frequently changed the rules, most recently restricting appeal avenues so as to shorten the time between conviction and execution, now averaging almost ten years. Even so, researchers still find inequities in how the death penalty is applied. Avoiding a death sentence depends a lot on having a good lawyer. Not surprisingly, rich, well-educated murderers rarely get a capital sentence. And the risk of executing the innocent remains very real. Since 1973, 78 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged.
The attempt to apply the death penalty fairly has exhausted even some of its staunchest supporters on the bench. After retiring from the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell, the author of a landmark 1987 decision upholding Georgia's death penalty even in the face of an undisputed statistical study showing racial bias in its application, said that he regretted the decision and backed abolition.
America's stubborn retention of the death penalty is usually seen as the abolitionist movement's greatest defeat. And yet in the long term it may prove to be one of its greatest assets. If even America, with its complex legal guarantees and elaborate court system, cannot apply the death penalty fairly or avoid condemning the innocent, then do executions have a place in any society which values justice?
5. The end of privacy. The Surveillance Society
“The right to be left alone.” For many this phrase, made famous by Louis Brandeis, an American Supreme Court justice, captures the essence of a notoriously slippery, but crucial concept. Drawing the boundaries of privacy has always been tricky. Most people have long accepted the need to provide some information about themselves in order to vote, work, shop, pursue a business, socialise or even borrow a library book. But exercising control over who knows what about you has also come to be seen as an essential feature of a civilised society.
Totalitarian excesses have made “Big Brother” one of the 20th century's most frightening bogeymen. Some right of privacy, however qualified, has been a major difference between democracies and dictatorships. An explicit right to privacy is now enshrined in scores of national Constitutions as well as in international human-rights treaties. Without the “right to be left alone,” to shut out on occasion the prying eyes and importunities of both government and society, other political and civil liberties seem fragile. Today most people in rich societies assume that, provided they obey the law, they have a right to enjoy privacy whenever it suits them.
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They are wrong. Despite a raft of laws, treaties and constitutional provisions, privacy has been eroded for decades. This trend is now likely to accelerate sharply. The cause is the same as that which alarmed Brandeis when he first popularised his phrase in an article in 1890: Technological change, in his day it was the spread of photography and cheap printing that posed the most immediate threat to privacy. In our day it is the computer. The quantity of information that is now available to governments and companies about individuals would have horrified Brandeis. But the power to gather and disseminate data electronically is growing so fast that it raises an even more unsettling question: in 20 years' time, will there be any privacy left to protect?
Most privacy debates concern media intrusion, which is also what bothered Brandeis. And yet the greatest threat to privacy today comes not from the media, whose antics affect few people, but from the mundane business of recording and collecting an ever-expanding number of everyday transactions. Most people know that information is collected about them, but are not certain how much. Many are puzzled or annoyed by un solicited junk mail coming through their letter boxes. And yet junk mail is just the visible tip of an information iceberg. The volume of personal data in both commercial and government databases has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years along with advances in computer technology. The United States, perhaps the most computerised society in the world, is leading the way, but other countries are not far behind.
Advances in computing are having a twin effect. They are not only making it possible to collect information that once went largely unrecorded, but are also making it relatively easy to store, analyse and retrieve this information in ways which, until quite recently, were impossible.
Just consider the amount of information already being collected as a matter of routine – any spending that involves a credit or bank debit card, most financial transactions, telephone calls, all dealings with national or local government. Supermarkets record every item being bought by customers who use discount cards. Mobile-phone companies are busy installing equipment that allows them to track the location of anyone who has a phone switched on. Electronic toll-booths and traffic-monitoring systems can record the movement of individual vehicles. Pioneered in Britain, closed-circuit TV cameras now scan increasingly large swathes of urban landscapes in other countries too. The trade in consumer information has hugely expanded in the past ten years. One single company, Acxiom Corporation in Conway, Arkansas, has a database combining public and consumer information that covers 95% of American house holds. Is there anyone left on the planet who does not know that their use of the Internet is being recorded by somebody, somewhere?
Firms are as interested in their employees as in their customers. A 1997 survey by the American Management Association of 900 large companies found that nearly two-thirds admitted to some form of electronic surveillance of their own workers. Powerful new software makes it easy for bosses to monitor and record not only all telephone conversations, but every keystroke and e-mail message as well.
Information is power, so it is hardly surprising that governments are as keen as companies to use data-processing technology. They do this for many entirely legitimate reasons – tracking benefit claimants, delivering better health care, fighting crime, pursuing terrorists. But it inevitably means more government surveillance.
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A controversial law passed in 1994 to aid law enforcement requires telecoms firms operating in America to install equipment that allows the government to intercept and monitor all telephone and data communications, although disputes between the firms and the FBI have delayed its implementation. Intelligence agencies from America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand jointly monitor all international satellite-telecommunications traffic via a system called “Echelon” that can pick specific words or phrases from hundreds of thousands of messages.
6. “Call to Arms”
New York – Two cheers for the Chief Justice who told the American Bar Association the other day that defense against crime was as vital to national security as “the budget of the Pentagon”. In fact, it's probably of more immediate concern to most Americans.
With no empty blasts about “getting tough”, he said many other things that needed to be said – for example, that the great cost of lowering crime rates would be less “than the billions in dollars and thousands of blighted lives now hostage to crime”. Nor is this an elitist view, since crime afflicts “the poor and minorities even more than the affluent”.
We need the undoubted deterrence of “swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty, and – at some point – finality of Judgment”. And to mount a real attack on crime will demand “more money than we have ever before devoted to law enforcement”, as well as much rethinking of what law enforcement should be.
Still, on such a complex and emotional subject, the chief justice inevitably raised more questions than he provided answers. It's true that crime will not disappear “if we but abolish poverty”. But it's more important that poverty and inequity and lack of economic opportunity breed crime, particularly when exacerbated by racial animosities, as in the United States. And where so much poverty exists in such proximity to so much affluence, the crime-breeding effect is likely to be greater.
The chief justice's specific proposals, moreover, will not be easy to effect, even when their validity is accepted. Trial “within weeks of arrest” is highly desirable, but where are hard-pressed cities like Cleveland and New York to find the money for the needed judges, prosecutors, police officers? And in most such cities, by far the most cases are now disposed of by plea bargaining rather than by trial.
He also proposed empowering judges to hold arrested persons without bail when “a combination of the particular crime and past record” makes it likely that the defendant will commit another crime while awaiting trial.
His argument for limiting the scope of appellate review of criminal convictions to “genuine claims of miscarriage of justice, and not a quest for error” also rests on judges' questionable ability to tell one from the other.
Unlike many reformers, the speaker knows that his proposals, if carried out, would send many more people to prison. He also understands that to send them to the overcrowded, underfunded, inadequately staffed and policed prisons of the United States would negate his purpose; be cause more, and more frightening, criminals come out of these schools of crime and violence than go into them.
That is why he proposes prison reforms. He wants prisons to provide mandatory educational and vocational programs designed to “cure” inmates who would be released with at least a basic education.
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And what good are the basic skills the Chief Justice wants to give in mates when they return to a society largely unwilling to hire them – particularly blacks or Hispanic people with a record of violence – and an economy with a declining need for low-skill labor?
Deterrence of crime – particularly speedy trial and certain punishment – is vitally needed. How best to achieve it is a subject on which thoughtful and honorable persons disagree – and on which has usefully dramatized, not settled the debate.
Democracy is on the March
If there has been a single, recurring theme in western foreign policy-speak since the cold war, it has been the promotion of liberal democracy – not just multi-party politics, but all the things that underpin it, such as the rule of the law, respect for property rights and the absence of police repression. Movement in this direction was assumed not just to be desirable but inevitable; the main challenge for policy makers was to hurry it along.
People may concede that Francis Fukuyama, America's guru of geopolitical optimism, was going a bit too far when – after the collapse of undemocratic regimes in the Soviet Union and South Africa – he proclaimed the end of history. But a milder version of his thesis has passed into conventional wisdom. Wherever brutish regimes persist in torturing, expropriating or otherwise silencing their enemies, the West grits its teeth and says that “progress” towards the Promised Land of liberal democracy has been surprisingly slow.
But what if no such “progress” can be assumed at all? Although the number of governments formally committed to democracy may be increasing, Freedom House, an American think-tank that measures political liberty by a sophisticated range of indicators, reckons that only 39% of the world's population now enjoys real political freedom – hardly a massive leap forward from the 36% enjoying it in 1983. And even that slow rate of increase cannot necessarily be relied on. The think-tank notes “growing evidence that the wave of democratisation that began in the 1970s may have crested and... be receding.”
Looking round the world, democracy seems well enough entrenched in Latin America, even if some of its concomitants, such as clean government and due process, are not. In Asia, it is too soon to tell whether the economic crisis will embolden or weaken those who argue that “Asian values” are an excuse for authoritarianism. But elsewhere there are good reasons to fear that western political values will retreat in the near term.
Democratic institutions are hard to build, and easy to topple when not yet completed. Take the Middle East, where liberal democracy has never been in fashion. As they struggle to cope with demographic explosions and various forms of revolutionary dissent, many regimes will have to choose between being “liberal” – in other words, being secular and modernist about things like education and gender – and being democratic. The latter would entail yielding power to radicals or fundamentalists; they may, in turn give some or all of it back to the people, but it is hardly a sure thing in the short run.
Algeria is only the most extreme example of a country where unbridled democracy would assuredly bring fundamentalists to power and is therefore regarded, both by its own government and many western ones, as a dispensable luxury. To stay in office, other “moderate” Arab governments – from North Africa to the West Bank will resort to increasingly ruthless methods: using secret services to infiltrate, divide and crush opposition movements that might otherwise be unstoppable.
What about the former Soviet Union, where some of the most euphoric pro-democracy rhetoric was once heard? In the southern republics, rulers who held senior positions under communism have used the flimsiest sort of democratic window-dressing to ensure that they remain in office indefinitely. In Russia, the outward forms of multi-party politics and constitutional procedure have proved more robust; but the culture of democracy runs shallow.
And what about Africa, where a spectacular revival of multi-party democracy seemed to reach its peak around 1994? Across a wide swathe of the continent, from Angola to Eritrea, issues of political procedure are overwhelmed by war.
There are still two huge countries – Nigeria and Indonesia – where the near-term trend is towards more political freedom. But both countries face a profound challenge: is it possible for states with vast, diverse populations and acute economic difficulties to go on existing at all, let alone existing democratically? To have a democratic future – which means learning to disagree amicably about particular issues – people in these countries need to develop a much stronger consensus about fundamental issues: state borders, the constitution, property rights and intangibles like national identity. And in Lagos and Jakarta, as well as Moscow and New Delhi, the rules and would-rules are faced with a fraying of consensus, not a consolidation.
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When the snarling's over
The post-cold-war solitary American superpower, say many Europeans, has to be held in check, lest it create an unacceptably Americanised world. The mighty dollar needs to be balanced by the gallant young euro. The spread of American popular culture must be slowed, even if it is popular outside America too.
What many of these Europeans do not realise is that their grumblings are drowned by the growlings of frustrated Americans.
The arthritic economy of continental Europe, say angry Americans, leaves it to them to bear most of the burden of helping recession-hit Asia and Latin America, by buying more imports from these regions and thereby making their own trade deficit even worse. The European Union, though richer than the United States, provides a tiny and diminishing pro portion of the high-tech military equipment that NATO depends on if it is to be able to fight wars without an intolerable number of casualties. Now that Europe no longer has to worry about Hitler's Germany or a communist Russia, conclude these exasperated Americans, Europe can be left to its own devices. “Deep structural forces”, says Stephen Walt in the current issue of the National Interest, are “beginning to pull Europe and America apart.”
In fact, the sky is not quite that black. The expansion of NATO goes ahead.
Nevertheless, the gloomsters could yet prove right. The Atlantic alliance may indeed collapse, unless both Europeans and Americans look forward rather than backward: unless they base their plans not on memories of the past 50 years but on a reasonable calculation of what the next 50 years will bring.
If the United States were indeed going to remain the world's only great power as far ahead as the eye can see, people believe in the danger of monopoly and the need for competition would draw the necessary conclusion: Europe should provide a counterbalance to this overwhelming American power. But that is not in fact what the future really holds. If the European part of NATO raises its eyes beyond its own borders, and sees what will probably happen out there in the next generation or so, it will understand why it still needs America and – even more important – why America increasingly needs Europe.
The one-superpower world will not last. Within the next couple of decades a China with up to 1 14 billion people, a strongly growing economy and probably a still authoritarian government will almost certainly be trying to push its interests eastward into the Pacific and westward into Central Asia, whose oil and gas this energy-poor China will badly need. Sooner or later some strong and honest man will pull post-Yeltsin Russia together, and another contender for global influence will have reappeared on the scene (unless fear of China sends a horrified Russia running into NATO's arms). The Islamist superpower that nervous people predicted a few years ago will probably never come into being, but the Muslim world will certainly continue to produce localised explosions of ideological wrath and geopolitical envy.
This is why the alliance of the democracies needs not only new members but also a new purpose. The alliance can no longer be just a protective American arm around Europe's shoulder; it also has to be a way for Europe and America to work together in other parts of the world. And those who hope to construct a politically united Europe should recognise that this must be done – if it can be done at all – in partnership with America, not to separate Europe from America.
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