ABSTRACT: The reasons for the campaign against the death penalty and for the safety of Paula Cooper.

"Each person has the right to life, to freedom and to the safety of his person...None shall be submitted to torture or to other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment".

There are many principles in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, proclaimed by the Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, which have since remained a dead letter. The one quoted above is certainly the principle which has been the most systematically violated.

The reason for which we mobilized and are struggling for the life of Paula Cooper and for the abrogation of the macabre and barbaric sanction lies in the necessary assertion of the right to life of each and every inhabitant of the planet.

The credibility and the effectiveness of this battle depend on the assertion of this principle as the primary argument to be sustained.

Clearly, in the case of the young black from Gary, Indiana, we cannot but assert the absurdity of the fact of sentencing to death a person who has committed an offence (ghastly as it may be) at the age of fifteen; just as we cannot disregard the fact that Paula Cooper's childhood was suffered more than lived.

But the principle of any campaign against the death penalty must be the assertion of the principle "do not kill", always and in any circumstance.

The death penalty is irreversible; nonetheless is it inflicted and carried out by fallible human beings, on the basis of legal procedures which, "perfect" as they may be, are also fallible.

It is proven that capital punishment has no effect as a deterrent for crime more than detentive penalties do. If ever, it can be realistic to presume that the fact that a regulation provides for the death penalty enhances and radicalizes crime. Whatever the offence committed, whatever the means by which a death sentence is carried out, it represents an inhuman, cruel and degrading punishment.

We often repeat a sentence by Giorgio Del Vecchio (1), and we want to do so here too. If we look at the history of mankind with honesty, Del Vecchio said, we would see that the history of penalties, in many of its pages, is no less disgraceful for mankind than the history of crimes. Throughout the world, it is the same story. During the last decades in which the death penalty had been in force, executions have increased in number and have totaled 120 (we are referring to countries in which even petty offences can be punished with the death penalty).

According to the figures concerning executions and convictions, we can say that 1987 is the year of legal assassination.

It is also the year in which the debate over the death penalty, which is in force in 39 of the 50 states of the U.S. has further developed, at least in Europe. Thanks to Paula Cooper, thanks to the attention given to the sentences inflicted by U.S. judges to minors. However it is easy enough to be against the legal assassination of Paula Cooper. In Italy, many have taken her defence, and the the defence of the elementary principle of civilization and humanity which the execution of the young American would violate. But not one voice raised itself to criticize the decision of the Supreme Court of Washington which decided to extradite the Nazi war criminal Karl Linnas from the U.S., where his real identity had been discovered after decades, to the USSR, where Linnas had been sentenced to death in absentia. Not one comment, not one editorial, just plain news. This is too convenient. Being civilized means being different from those who kill. We should be capable of continuing our campaign against the death penal

ty with Paula Cooper alive and after Paula Cooper. As Radicals, with the Do Not Kill Committee which we promoted together with Carcere e Comunità, involving over fifty organizations of all kinds.

Above all, we should be capable of convincing anyone who states that the death penalty can be "fair" and "necessary" in "certain cases", unless someone can tell us exactly where is the objective and subjective limit beyond which it is fair to condemn a single human being to death. The problem lies entirely in that limit. And not a single jurist, not a single legislator, not a single judge in the world is reasonably and credibly in the conditions of establishing that limit.

(1) Giorgio Del Vecchio: Italian philosopher of law