Editorial: Execution hollow and degrading act

By the time this is read Timothy McVeigh will be dead and many will say the world is none the poorer. But it is. McVeigh, the man who planted the bomb that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City six years ago, will not be missed. But in taking his life, the United States has diminished itself. Vengeance is seldom as satisfying as the vengeful expect. When the deed is done, it seems a hollow, degrading thing.

All kinds of states still claim the right to put people to death. Among them are our near neighbours in Southeast Asia. The People's Republic of China is probably the world's worst executioner. In China, where about 60 crimes, many of them non-violent, carry the death penalty, the toll is a state secret. During a crackdown in April at least 400 people were reported to have been executed by bullet, 200 of them on one day, April 20. Human rights monitors suspect that the real tally in China is much higher than we ever hear.

Yet reports of capital punishment in Asia, the Arabic countries and other places never make quite the impact of those in the United States, perhaps because civilised law seemed to be making progress there.

Prisoners have been surviving on death row for decades while their appeals clog the courts. Quite a number of states have abandoned the death penalty and, until a few hours ago, the federal Government had not carried out an execution for 38 years.

But it would be a mistake to imagine that opposition to capital punishments has gained much ground in American public opinion. State executions seldom attract more than brief reports in local newspapers and the subject is almost never an issue at elections. Both presidential candidates last year, as usual, supported the death penalty.

Perhaps the reason American executions are particularly jarring to other Western countries is that they deeply offend the Christian tradition. The sanctity of human life is one of the central values of that tradition. Vengeance, and eye-for-an-eye, life for a life, is foreign to it. Yet the US, a much more religious society than most others in the West, continues to practise cold-blooded state killing.

The arguments against capital punishment have become tiresome to repeat. It plainly is no deterrent; nobody needs to look beyond the US for evidence of that. And if an innocent person is convicted, the consequence is appalling.

But the real reason that capital punishment is wrong is that life is sacred and nobody has the right to take the life of another. That applies to the state as much as to the murderer.

The state acts on the will of its citizens. Timothy McVeigh was put to death by all Americans this morning. It was done by cold, clinical, chemical means rather than the unsightly methods of the past.

And it was done away from the public gaze despite the efforts of news organisations to televise the event. That would have been an obscenity, playing to the most prurient of public interests. Yet in a way, people should see what is being done in their name.

It is just possible that if the public was confronted by the awful act of taking a human life, there would be a sense of complicity and a general revulsion. Nothing can suitably punish a single murder, let alone the atrocity that McVeigh committed. His death sentence has served his delusions of importance, nothing else.

The execution cannot bring back his victims or compensate their loved ones. It can only leave a sense of the barbarity of the crime and the punishment. It is an offence on humanity.