Photo: Ursula Abresch

One of the worst arguments I ever had in public was with my teenage son Olly and stepson Quentin. We were in a restaurant in Lower Hutt. Lorraine and Aaron Cohen had just been arrested for drug trafficking in Malaysia. The boys thought the Cohens deserved whatever they got. They knew the risks.

 I remember asking them if they were in favour of the death penalty. They said they were. I then began describing in graphic detail what happens when a prisoner is hanged, electrocuted, gassed, shot, given a lethal injection. At the end of each description, I heard myself screaming, ‘Is that what you’re in favour of? Come on, tell me, is that what you’re in favour of?’ I was red in the face and they were as pale as sheets. The whole restaurant was listening to this exchange. I had really lost my cool.  Looking back, I don’t feel too bad about it. I think I did the right thing. Perhaps not in the right way, but the right thing nonetheless.

My fierce opposition to the death penalty is based on the simple proposition that every execution is barbaric and that the practice has no place in a civilised society. This is a more fundamental position than that taken by many opponents of capital punishment, who argue that an innocent man or woman may go to the gallows and that this constitutes an egregious breach of natural justice. The argument  is sound, but it allows for the corollary that it is acceptable for a guilty man or woman to go to the gallows. Guilt and innocence are a distraction from the real issue, that the whole process of execution is gruesome and macabre, that the physical and psychological suffering of the prisoner is invariably awful. There is no humane way to take the life of someone who does not wish to die.

Capital punishment thus crosses the line between punishment and torture. And while, in most civilised societies, you will find people, often a majority,  who say they are in favour of capital punishment, you will rarely find people who say they are in favour of torture.

At the heart of this torture is the prisoner’s knowledge of the precise time and manner of his death. Most of us have no idea when we will die or how. Even the terminal cancer patient, given, say, a week to live, operates within a forgiving margin of error, a merciful uncertainty as to the exact moment of death. And the pain of dying is eased not just by medical intervention, but by the physically and mentally anaesthetising processes within the patient’s own mind and body, processes that seem to be part of a natural death.

Now consider the prisoner on death row. What thoughts occupy his mind? What images haunt him in the middle of the night?  Torture. The  torture of unknown terrors, of fearful imaginings.  And in countries like the United States, where (properly) every safeguard against wrongful execution, every opportunity for appeal is built into the process, that torture may last for years. Small wonder that so many death row inmates choose to abandon their appeals or attempt to end their own lives rather than endure such ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.

And when the appeals are exhausted, the prisoner receives that knowledge which the rest of us are spared – the precise time and manner of his death. Here there are no physically or mentally anaesthetising processes, for neither the body nor the mind are ready to die. Death is out of season for a healthy person. Mind and body resist. The commonest words spoken by those about to be executed are, ‘Please, I don’t want to die.’

It may seem strange in the context of such horrendous physical trauma, to concern oneself with the issue of human dignity. But it is interesting to speculate on how you might handle the moment when the cell door opens and the warden says it’s time. Will you walk quietly and stoically to the place of execution? Will you volunteer to sit in the chair, lie down on the gurney?  Will you make a fist to assist the doctor in administering the lethal injection? Will you deeply inhale the gas? Why not? To struggle or resist is futile. Yet somehow it seems more natural, more dignified than to co-operate, to acquiesce in your own killing.

What distinguishes the premeditated and cold-blooded  murder of the citizen by the State from most homicides is in part that it is premeditated and cold-blooded, in part that the victim knows when and how he will die. But there is a further distinction. Faced with a victim pleading for his life, the most brutal killer may, just possibly,  relent and show compassion. Such pleas are wasted in the execution chamber. The State knows no mercy.

Perhaps it is this meeting of absolute power and absolute powerlessness that ultimately offends me most about capital punishment, the annihilation of human dignity that precedes the annihilation of life. One cannot even die by one’s own hand, giving at least an illusion of volition. Those who attempt suicide are rescued from death, in order that they may be later killed.

I do not enjoy writing this. I do not want to think about people frying in electric chairs, their blood boiling in their veins.  I do not want to imagine people choking to death in gas chambers. I do not want to hear in my head the voice of a woman, strapped to a gurney,  pleading for mercy as the prison doctor struggles to find a vein. It is awful. It is the stuff of nightmares.

But precisely because it is awful, precisely because it is the stuff of nightmares, we must think about it.  Faced with a series of savage killings, an increasing number of New Zealanders believe the death penalty should be reintroduced for certain particularly brutal crimes. They are not bad people. You don’t have to be a bad person to think that those who brutally take the lives of others deserve to lose their own. But it is my submission that in order to believe in capital punishment,  you have to be ignorant of what happens at an execution and you have to lack the imagination to put yourself into the mind of the man or woman condemned to death. It is my submission that no informed person with an ounce of humanity can believe in the death penalty.

Against this it may be argued that if capital punishment, however inhumane, deters one potential killer, saves one innocent life, then the price is worth paying. But there is absolutely no evidence that the existence of the death penalty deters potential killers. Indeed the opposite may be the case.

There is one argument for capital punishment that seems to have some logical force – those who are put to death never re-offend. But neither do those who are kept in prison for life. The same outcome can be achieved without killing the offender. The argument thus exposes the only true rationale for the death penalty – to satisfy society’s lust for revenge.

Yet despite what I regard as the overwhelming arguments against capital punishment, if enough New Zealanders demand the re-introduction of the death penalty for certain categories of murder, then, whatever they say now, the politicians will eventually support it. It is in their nature. A recent poll found that almost half of respondents favoured the reintroduction of the death penalty. With the clamour for harsher penalties for violent offenders, championed by Garth McVicar and others, it is not fanciful to speculate that the lethal injection may be just around the corner.

In a democracy each of us must accept responsibility for what we choose. And each of us has a moral obligation to ensure that, in matters of life and death, our choices are informed. No one who has not read Amnesty International’s annual reports on executions in both the ‘civilised’ and the uncivilised world, is entitled even to express a view on capital punishment, let alone support it. No-one who has not read those reports can begin to answer the question, ‘Is that what you’re in favour of?’

[This piece was originally published as a Listener column]