Subject: DEATH PENALTY-Replay Mr DanR
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0 -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
X-Comment: The Transnational Radical Party List
Dear Mr DanR,
much as in the past a number of men had identified progressivist objectives
which escaped the majority of people (for instance, those who struggled to
abolish torture when it was considered a lawful instrument of trial
investigation or those who, barely a century ago, fought for the abolition
of slavery) today the Radical Party is promoting the campaign "Hands off
Cain" in the hope of steering the international social and juridical
conscience towards a progressivist course. The purpose of the "Hands off
Cain" campaign is to obtain the recognition of a new civil and penal right:
the right not to be killed following a sentence or judicial measure, even
if legally adopted.
At present, the death penalty is applied only in totalitarian or
fundamentalist regimes. It has instead been abolished in almost all
democratic countries, with the sole exception of the United States. This
obviously points to the fact that the death penalty is incompatible with
the democratic juridical culture.
On the other hand, the death penalty can never be justified, not even on
the basis of particular logical and juridical motivations. The reason which
is conventionally put forward to support the need for the death penalty is
its supposed deterrent effect. Nonetheless, a number of surveys have shown
that this deterrence is effective on less and less people. At the same
time, there is a growing demand, in the countries with very high crime
rates, to adopt a simplistic principle according to which a person who has
killed must in turn be killed. This attitude can lead to aberrant
conclusions which we could define as juridical "fundamentalism" if we think
that the final penalty is the death of an individual. It is the case of the
Supreme Court of the United States, which, in the Leonel Torres Herrera
case, has gone so far as to maintain that the only truth that counts is the
one that issues from the trial, and that innocence proven after the trial
is constitutionally irrelevant and cannot lead to a reconsideration of the
death sentence.
Obviously we realize there are cultures, traditions and religions that
legitimate capital punishment, and that wanting to "prohibit" the death
penalty immediately and everywhere would be a highly unrealistic objective.
That is why we suggest a strategy of strict regulation based on: a
moratorium of the executions; the guarantee of a public trial; the right to
legal assistance and to several degrees of judgment; the reduction of the
number of crimes punishable with the death penalty.
The deadline we have set ourselves is year 2000. By that date, we want to
introduce abolitionist bills in the various parliaments of the countries
that maintain the death penalty, and obtain its cancellation from the penal
and constitutional texts of all the countries of the world.
Only then will citizens cease to be killed by the State just as they have
ceased to be tortured by it.
