A few days ago I read an article on the increasing support for the death penalty in cases dealing with child rape.
No-one is going to feel sorry for the people who commit these atrocious crimes, but something makes me feel really uncomfortable about calling for the death penalty: I think it’s wrong to seek it in these cases.
The article goes like this:
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The idea of executing child rapists, even when there in no loss of life, is making headway in the United States.
The Louisiana Supreme Court last week upheld the death sentence for a pedophile, and the governor of Texas is soon to sign into law legislation to that effect.
In 1995, Louisiana was the first state to adopt legislation authorizing the death penalty for child rapists.
Ten years later, the movement to make pedophilia punishable by death really picked up steam after nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford was raped and buried alive in Florida by a man with a prior conviction for sex crimes.
Let’s face it, child rapists are the more reviled type of criminals and deserve to be taken off the streets.
This call for the death penalty though sounds too much like popular justice.
I will not enter into the debate on whether the death penalty is a deterrent or not.
I think it isn’t, but in this case it’s not really the point, there are other issues to consider.
However horrible the crime is the victim is still living and, while scarred for life, will probably still be able to outlive their painful experience.
The punishment does not fit the crime. Child rape is particularly horrendous because it is a predation on the defenceless, nevertheless, it is not cold blooded murder.
Because anything to do with child abuse is so emotionally charged, it is possible that someone may not get a fair trial and may end-up being wrongly convicted.
Crimes against children are particularly sensitive: no-one wants to be associated with such a deed and it’s quite natural that the victim would elicit more sympathy and the accused more hatred than they would for other crimes.
The result is that crimes against children are not always well investigated. In some instances, helping the children cope with their deposition actually unwittingly coaxed them into feeding false information.
So the bias against anyone accused of crimes toward children is fairly strong, to the extent that the presumption of innocence may be far from everyone’s mind, resulting in a disastrous travesty of justice.
Letting populist sentiment for revenge dictate justice is wrong. There are good reasons why civilised justice systems have been set up: letting pitch-and-fork mobs decide the fate of the accused led to summary justice that was driven by hot-headed feelings and not reasonable and balanced evaluation of the facts.
The last but not least argument is that some child rapists would now think they would be better off killing their victims rather than take the risk of letting them live to tell the tale.
The punishment being the same, any abused children would actually be more at risk than ever before, and that is a disturbing thought.
