Q. A referendum is scheduled to take place on 3 November, to coincide with the presidential elections, to decide on the reinstatement of the death penalty in the District of Columbia.

The RP is taking steps on the matter, with national and European actions and with an appeal addressed to the U.S. federal authorities.

How do you judge the fact that an advanced democracy such as the American one resorts to a referendum to reinstate the death penalty?

A. First of all, what do we mean by Democracy?

There is such a thing as a totalitarianism of money, of power.

The word democracy is a dangerous word. I'm not surprised you ask me this question. The appeal for the Referendum...Everyone will defend the property. Therefore, those who do not agree with property are killed, that's all.

Q. Is it fair to decide on matters that pertain to the individual's inalienable rights with a referendum?

A. What do we mean by inalienable rights of the individual?

I think all social groups defend themselves. What I would like to say is that punishment is considered fair when it is applied to the criminals.

Obviously, the most serious punishment is the death penalty; in any case, it takes a lot of arrogance to believe one posses the Good Right, and knows the responsibility of an individual in order to judge that he should be punished.

The terrible thing is that the defendants themselves believe the punishment occurs because they have committed a crime, and that they are punished for this crime. Some time ago, about a century ago, the lepers, the wretched, those with no money, the criminals and the insane were isolated in the same place, for example in "La Salpétrière" in Paris.

Leprosy has been defeated, the poor, while they do not eat every day, manage to get by, the insane are cured. There remain the criminals.

And the criminals are isolated by a society which detains the right of the strongest individual, a society which decides, for example, that if a person does not comply with the principles that society has issued, that it has institutionalized with the laws, that person needs to be isolated.

In the past century, the French and the English did something else. For example, in New Caledonia, those who were considered criminals, and their children, became Caldoches. An odd thing happened: that these people, who avoided the death penalty, became the sovereigns of that place.

In France, there is a majority of the population that decides that the immigrants should be isolated, expelled. etc.

But who are the immigrants there? Certainly not the Kanaks. They are in their land, they are the Caldoches, i.e. the former criminals which society wanted to get rid of. And the British did the same thing in Australia. There the British simply slaughtered the Kanaks in order to the be safe. As you can see, the death penalty is a final punishment.

People who are in favour of the death penalty are also against abortion.

"Let them live!", they say.

But they consider it normal for an an adult, who is perfectly conscious, to be killed.

According to this mentality, an individual gets what he deserves only if he is sentenced to death and executed. But do those whom we kill throughout the world really deserve it?

There is not only the death penalty decided by the human laws, there are all the havocs, in Bosnia Herzegovina, with the Khmer Rouges, Panama, San Salvador....

In these cases, we do not speak about death penalty.

Q. Is it possible to react to the heinousness of the crimes and to their growth with a justice other than that according to which a person who has killed must be killed?

A. Personally speaking I think no one detains the truth. This is said not defend life. A death penalty is decided according to a certain truth, which is the truth of the majority which has decided to institutionalize it.

I am not at all certain that these institutionalized laws are fair, and I ignore where justice is.

To believe one detains the truth is extremely arrogant, and as I say, the only way to understand this social behaviour is isolating, getting rid of those who do not conform with the laws, the institutions, laws which are absolutely not perfect, but on the contrary extremely imperfect.

A few years ago, in the East, people who did not agree with Marxism-Leninism were sent to mental hospitals and were given drugs. Here, those who have no money or who disagree with the concept of property end up in jail, in mental hospitals, where they are also given drugs.

Ultimately, the principles of conformism are different, but we have to admit that they conform with institutionalized laws, laws that depend on a hierarchy of power or money, and this is by no means better.

Criminals are stupid people.

It is preferable to "submit", even without submitting, that is, doing what one wants to do, pretending to submit to these laws, which are generally coarse and low-level.

I think on the contrary it would be better to analyse the mechanisms that lead the human brain to issue a judgment, in favour or against this punishment, rather than discussing the pros and cons of the death penalty.

Q. This is very interesting. Could you explain it better?

A. The reasoning is always based on a logic which is not that of the brain biochemistry, of neurophysiology, of or the memory in learning, but always on the logic of the behaviours and judgements - which are often arrogant and without any value other than that of our own subconscious history - ,the logic of the society in which we live, where we grow up, which marks our nervous system.

If you ask ten different witnesses how a certain road accident occurred, they will describe the accident in ten different ways. There is no objectivity. There is no such thing as objectivity. What we call objectivity is subjectivity.

You judge with your entire store of knowledge, your social class, your human relations, with all your subconscious, all your automatic mechanisms. The judgements on the death penalty are made up of all this, and especially of the notion of property.

There is no instinct of property. There is no part of the brain which defines the instinct of property. During the learning processes, they taught you it was essential for your pleasure, for your happiness. If you were suddenly deprived of it, you would be unhappy. The entire justice system is based on the notion of property, which is inculcated into you.

There are populations which have never known this notion of property. The Eskimos, because they must survive; the people from the South Pacific, despite the fact that we have managed to destroy everything even there (including myself, when I was a researcher of the World Psychiatric Association, fifteen years ago, in the islands of the South Pacific), still lack the notion of property, and so do other human groups. This applies even to the property of the child whose father is unknown. Let's say a mother has two children, and she gives birth to another one. Another woman, who lives three kilometres away, visits her and asks her, "can I have your child?". The other woman answers, "of course, take him", because a child doesn't belong to the couple, but to an entire human group.

It is a completely different behaviour. Therefore, one cannot issue a judgement on the death penalty or on the punishment to inflict on an individual according to criteria which are trivial criteria, which originate from the early neolithic era.

Desert islands might be found, if they still exist, where the criminals could be isolated. Society wants to get rid of them, it can do so in a different way. But not by killing them.

That's about all I can say.

Q. Thank you...

A. But I can add something: the Bible says we must not kill. However, Christ was sentenced to death, and his execution caused some turnabouts in history, don't you think?

Q. Absolutely.

Q. You might answer that not all criminals are saints. But how can we tell? How is mental sanity judged? We sentenced Joan of Arc to death. Then we sanctified her. Statistically speaking, the death penalty has never caused a diminution in heinous crime. This is one argument. But apart from statistics and words, we need to explain why. The criminals are not always what they think they are. In my opinion, those who apply the death penalty are the criminals, not the ones whom we consider criminals.

I remember a poem by François Villon. It says, "And Semblancay (the count of Semblancay who was sentenced to death by François I) was a noble old man, who believed his threat of hanging Lieutenant Maillard in Monfaucon was true" (Lieutenant Maillard was the person who took him to the scaffold).

This is all I have to say. I would like to add that those who support the death penalty are incredibly coarse and impudent.