Public Matters

🚨 A Sentence That Cannot Be Undone The failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee is a reminder of what Britain learned at terrible cost: a state that kills will eventually get it wrong, and nothing can put that right. On Wednesday night in Nashville, the state of Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike and failed. Pike, now 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student on a job training programme in Knoxville. Her guilt has never been in question. Nothing that happened this week lessens what was done to Colleen, or what her family has carried for more than thirty years. A federal appeals court halted the execution an hour before it was due; the US Supreme Court lifted that stay the same day. Prison officials then administered two doses of pentobarbital. Pike survived both and was taken to hospital. Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, has ordered a third-party review and called off the state’s remaining execution this year. The Department of Correction insists it followed its protocol at every step. Nobody has yet explained why that protocol did not work. Supporters of capital punishment imagine a system that is swift, certain and clean. Tennessee has just shown the world that the machinery can fail even when guilt is beyond doubt. Britain’s own history shows something worse: the machinery working perfectly on the wrong person. In November 1949, Beryl Evans and her baby daughter, Geraldine, were killed at their home at 10 Rillington Place in west London. Beryl’s husband, Timothy, was charged with both murders. He was tried only for Geraldine’s, convicted, and hanged at Pentonville on 9 March 1950. The chief witness against him was his downstairs neighbour, John Christie. Three years later, the remains of six other women were found in and around the house. Christie was hanged for murder, and before he died he confessed to killing Beryl Evans too. In 1966 Timothy Evans received a posthumous royal pardon for Geraldine’s murder. By then he had been dead for sixteen years. Anyone who wants Britain to bring back the death penalty has to explain how it would avoid another Timothy Evans, or another night like Wednesday in Nashville. They can’t, because every justice system makes mistakes, and ours is no exception. Execution is irreversible, it has already killed innocent people in Britain, it deters no better than life imprisonment, and restoring it would mean tearing up international commitments Britain chose to make. The case against it rests on evidence, and the evidence is overwhelming. Evans was no isolated tragedy. Derek Bentley, nineteen years old and with a mental age assessed as far below that, was hanged in 1953 for the murder of PC Sidney Miles. Bentley was already under arrest when his sixteen-year-old accomplice, Christopher Craig, fired the fatal shot. The jury recommended mercy; the Home Secretary refused it. Craig, too young to hang, was released after ten years. Bentley’s conviction was finally quashed in 1998. Mahmood Hussein Mattan, a Somali seaman, was hanged in Cardiff in 1952. His conviction was quashed in 1998, the first case referred to the Court of Appeal by the new Criminal Cases Review Commission. George Kelly was hanged in Liverpool in 1950; his conviction was quashed in 2003. Each of these men was failed by police, prosecutors and courts who were certain they had the right man. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Britain, shows a different danger. Her guilt was never seriously in doubt, but she was executed in 1955 under a law that left no room for the abuse she had suffered. The defence of diminished responsibility did not exist until two years after her death. A mandatory penalty cannot weigh what the law has not yet learned to see. Nor did the errors stop with abolition. The Birmingham Six were convicted in 1975 of murdering 21 people in the pub bombings. The Guildford Four were convicted the same year. In the aftermath of those attacks, MPs debated bringing back hanging for terrorism. Had they succeeded, ten innocent men could have gone to the gallows. Instead, they lived long enough to be cleared. Stefan Kiszko spent sixteen years in prison for the 1975 murder of eleven-year-old Lesley Molseed, whose body was found on the moors above Ripponden. He was freed in 1992 when scientific evidence showed he could not have been the killer; another man, Ronald Castree, was convicted in 2007. Kiszko had confessed. Confessions, eyewitnesses and expert testimony have all sent innocent people to prison, and the Criminal Cases Review Commission has since sent hundreds of cases back to the Court of Appeal, many of them ending in quashed convictions. The United States offers a live demonstration of what modern forensics can and cannot do. Since 1973, at least 203 people sentenced to death in the US have been exonerated, about one for every eight executions. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences put a conservative estimate of 4% on the share of death-sentenced prisoners who are likely innocent. DNA has freed some of them, but it cannot fix false confessions, mistaken identifications, withheld evidence or prosecutorial misconduct. Those are the failures that convict the innocent, and a hanging closes off every chance of discovering them. The claim that the death penalty deters killers fares no better. In 2012 the US National Research Council reviewed decades of studies and concluded that the research tells us nothing reliable about whether capital punishment raises, lowers or has no effect on homicide rates, and should not be used to make policy. American states without the death penalty have not suffered higher murder rates than those that keep it, and abolitionist Western Europe has consistently lower murder rates than the United States. This makes sense once you look at how killings actually happen. In England and Wales, around half of all homicides arise from a quarrel, a revenge attack or a loss of temper, according to the Office for National Statistics. Someone in that moment is not weighing the remote prospect of a trial, an appeal and an execution years away. For the rare, calculated killer, whole life orders already guarantee they never walk free. Then there is the argument that it would be cheaper to execute a murderer than to house them for decades. The record suggests otherwise. Christa Pike spent thirty years on death row before Tennessee tried and failed to execute her. In Kansas, the state’s own Judicial Council reported that defending a capital trial cost about four times as much as defending a murder case where the death penalty could have been sought but was not, and that each year on death row cost twice as much as a year in an ordinary prison. The only way to make execution cheap is to make it quick. Britain once did: Derek Bentley was hanged seven weeks after his conviction, Timothy Evans about eight. Speed is what made their cases impossible to put right. Britain is also bound in law. Protocol 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights, in force for the UK since 2004, bans the death penalty in all circumstances, including wartime. The UK has also ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which contains no withdrawal clause. Reintroduction would mean leaving the ECHR and breaching a UN abolition treaty. More than two-thirds of the world’s countries have abolished execution in law or practice. The countries that execute most often, among them China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are hardly models of fair trials. Public support for hanging tends to rise after a horrific crime, and it is strongest among people who believe the system rarely makes mistakes. The record shows otherwise. Whole life orders already deliver punishment and public protection. What execution adds is the certainty that, sooner or later, the state will kill someone who did nothing wrong. Timothy Evans was convicted on the word of the man who later confessed to killing his wife. Everyone in that courtroom was sure. They were wrong, and nothing could bring him back.