Andrew L. Urban.
In the news: in America, after 30 years in solitary, Christa Pike’s execution went horribly wrong when two lethal injections left her unconscious but alive. Nadil Hasan will face a military firing squad set for December 3. Now that Donald Trump has expressed reservations, it may or may not be live streamed – if that’s the right term. Both were convicted of horrible murders, the latter of 13 US servicemen. But is the death penalty just murder by the State*?
There are many critics of both of these cases; the cruelty of botched execution attempts, the barbarity of live-streaming an execution most pertinent. Other criticisms of the death penalty include the risk of executing innocents (there have indeed been some).
Whoever is guilty of murder in the first degree shall be punished by death; except if the punishment is committed by an authorised representative of the United States.
Contrary to popular assumption, capital cases are typically far more expensive than sentences of life without parole. The extra costs come from longer trials, specialized legal teams, extensive appeals, and heightened security requirements. Many defendants ultimately serve life sentences anyway after years of costly litigation.
“To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.” – Desmond Tutu
Opponents argue that the death penalty itself violates the right to life and constitutes cruel or degrading punishment. This includes the psychological torment of long stays on death row (“death row phenomenon”) and the reality of botched executions (especially with lethal injection). International human rights bodies and many democracies treat it as incompatible with modern standards of human dignity.
Critics also argue that retribution does not restore the victim and that the practice diminishes society’s moral standing. Quite. Defenders of the death penalty point to the worst crimes, vicious murders, terrorism and so on, to justify it.
The one challenge to the death penalty to which I subscribe is the one formulated by the late Desmond Tutu, South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner (1931–2021): “To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.” If we make an exception for murder by the apparatus of the State, it is impossible to make a moral, rational case that murder is evil and wrong.
*Andrew L. Urban is the author of Murder by the Prosecution (Wilkinson Publishing), exposing several wrongful convictions.
Thank you for shining a light on this profound injustice.
The term ‘murder by the state’ is chillingly accurate when a legal system; blinded by tunnel vision or wedded to a flawed prosecution theory allows an innocent person to rot behind bars.
What makes these miscarriages of justice so infuriating is the institutional arrogance that follows. When new evidence emerges or deep-seated flaws are exposed, the system doesn’t rush to correct its mistakes; instead, it circles the wagons, weaponizes red tape, and treats the preservation of its own infallible image as more important than human life and liberty.
We need systemic, independent oversight bodies. Oversight bodies like a genuinely empowered Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Only a Criminal Cases Review Commission can cut through the bureaucratic self-protection of the courts. Until admitting an error isn’t treated as an admission of weakness by the legal establishment, the state will continue to commit these quiet, devastating tragedies.
After learning what we have about the adversarial legal system, anyone who is in favour of the death penalty is either retarded or quite mad.
Julia Gillard, Australia’s first and worst female prime minister, destroyed women’s sex-based rights in 2013 by amending the Sex Discrimination Act to insert “gender identity” protections. This act of direct harm to all women, past, present and future, will forever sit in the toilet of history. She erased clear sex-based safeguards and handed biological males access to women’s spaces, sports, prisons and services. As such, Julia Gillard is the ultimate misogynist.
The Federal Court has since proved itself an ass. In the Giggle case it treated Sall Grover’s laughter at a caricature as aggravating conduct and ordered damages while endorsing the fiction that a man becomes a woman by declaration. Sex is binary and immutable. A man in a dress remains a man. Courts that refuse to apply truth and logic in favour of ideological capture have abandoned both the law and reality.