"Death row lets victims' families down," is the title of Jessica Reed's report in today's Guardian.
Most debates about the criminal justice system and restorative justice are criticised for not focusing enough on the impact that violence has on victims and their families. Those objections multiply tenfold when the issue at hand is capital punishment: bring up the subject and many death penalty supporters will say that executions are the only way to meet survivors' needs for justice and closure, and that to oppose capital punishment is to be anti-victim. "What if it was your own son or mother?" they ask. "Wouldn't you want the perpetrator die at the hands of our justice system?"
As it turns out, the truth is rather different. During last week's fourth world congress against death penalty in Geneva, the voices of murder victims' families painted a picture seldom seen in the media. For a variety of reasons, a growing number of families do not support capital punishment. However, all families face decades of legal appeals over the execution of the perpetrator – a truly agonising wait for anyone seeking closure.
For some, such as the members of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights, opposition to capital punishment is first and foremost ideological: in their mind, the response to one human rights violation should not be another one. Others, such as Vicki Schieber, resent the attention that inmates on death row receive. Schieber's daughter, Shannon, was murdered in Pennsylvania in 1998, and she fought the district attorney and prosecutors to keep the death penalty from being applied to her daughter's killer, poignantly writing that "one tragedy of the death penalty is that it turns society's perspective away from the victim and creates an outpouring of support for those who have perpetuated a crime. This is not the way to honour our daughter's life".
But beyond ideologies, participants in Geneva were particularly keen to accentuate how little support families receive after tragedies. Renny Cushing, whose father was murdered in 1988, spoke at length about the lack of resources available to victims. He told the harrowing story of a woman whose husband was killed. A few weeks later, she received a hefty bill for the cost of the ambulance which transported the body. She had, in effect, to pay for her family member's death.
Extraordinary funds are allocated to keep prisoners on death row at the taxpayer's expense: having someone on death row adds $90,000 per inmate per year to the normal cost of incarceration, which could be diverted to meet the murder victims' families most immediate needs. In California alone, $125m could be saved every year if death penalty sentences were switched to life without parole. And while psychological support and financial support for those suffering material loss should be key elements helping survivors to get on with their lives as efficiently and compassionately as possible, woefully inadequate funds are directly dedicated to compensation.
Bianca Jagger has posted the content of her remarks at the Congress as, "The Time Has Come to Say No to Death," at Huffington Post.
I am proud to be representing the Council of Europe. On 16 December 2003, I was appointed Council of Europe's Goodwill Ambassador "for the abolition of the death penalty."
Since it was founded in 1949 the Council of Europe has played a leading role as a guardian of our fundamental rights and freedoms, and since 2002 it has guaranteed that no European citizen, with the exception of those in Belarus, will have to face a death sentence.
The European Convention on Human Rights, which was adopted in 1950, states that "Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally."1 However, the Convention did allow the death penalty to be imposed when it was provided for by law.
In the early 1980s, the Council of Europe became a pioneer for the abolition of capital punishment, considering it a grave violation of human rights. The organisation's Parliamentary Assembly gradually persuaded governments to help Europe become the first region in the world to permanently outlaw the death penalty. In 1982, the Council of Europe adopted Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which became the first legally-binding instrument abolishing the death penalty in peacetime. With the exception of Belarus, Europe is today the only region in the world where the death penalty is no longer applied.
In 1989, abolition of the death penalty was made a prerequisite of accession for all new member states. Since then, all countries are committed to introducing an immediate moratorium on executions and ratifying Protocol No. 6 when joining the organisation. A number of mechanisms have been set up to monitor the respect of those commitments while assisting governments with their implementation. As a result, no execution has taken place on the territory of the organisation's member states since 1997. To date the protocol has been ratified by 46 of the Council's 47 member states; the one exception -- Russia -- has committed itself to ratification, and in the meantime is adhering to a moratorium on the use of the death penalty.
In 2002, the Council adopted Protocol No. 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights which requires the complete abolition of capital punishment -- even for acts committed in times of war. As a result, there has not been a single execution in any member state of the Council of Europe for 13 years.
Earlier coverage of the Geneva meeting is here.
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