Mick Hartley

Christopher Hitchens, in his essay on capital punishment (see also here and here), claims to have understood at last why it is that the US, alone amongst western nations, has maintained its fondness for the death penalty. It's all about religion:

And then it hit me. I had been hammering on an open door. Nobody had been bothering to argue that the rope or the firing squad, or the gas chamber, or “Old Sparky” the bristle-making chair, or the deadly catheter were a deterrent. The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity of the lex talionis and the principle of an eye for an eye….

He may have a point, though anyone wanting to absolve religion from its responsibility here can readily point to the grim history of communism. Nowadays North Korea should be added to the list as well as China – which, as by far the world's greatest judicial killer, can hardly be dismissed in parentheses as Hitchens does.

An important factor missing here though, I think, is an appreciation of the popular nature of American democracy.

On this side of the Atlantic we're happy to elect our politicians and let them get on with it. We don't expect them to fully represent our views on every topic, or hold a referendum each time there's an important political debate. They form a political class, and, once elected, we leave them to make their own decisions. This has reached the point with the EU now where politicians hardly even have to bother any more with the tiresome business of getting elected. They're a class above, and the unspoken assumption – despite all the evidence – is that, basically, they probably know best. 

In the US, by contrast, politicians are seen as servants of the people; as at best a necessary evil. 

The point is that capital punishment is favoured by a majority of the population. Less so here than in the US, it seems, but still a majority. In America that's good enough: capital punishment is the will of the people, and that's that. Here, well, we have a generally more civilised selection of individuals in the House of Commons, who are prepared to protect the nation from the baser instincts of the population at large.

As an opponent of the death penalty I'm happy with that, but it does leave a slightly awkward moment in debates when trying to justify why the will of the people, in this particular case, should be ignored.