Axel Rudakabana
The life-sentencing of Axel Rudakabana for the murder of three schoolgirls at a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport in 2023 rekindled the death penalty debate in the UK.
Some states in the US have the death penalty, some don’t, but the debate still rages in that country, too. Head of the LA Crips Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams was executed by lethal injection in 2005, maintaining his innocence (of conviction for murder) even as the cocktail was injected.
An argument against the DP is the prevalence of miscarriages of justice: were it to become law, Jeremy Bamber, Robin Garbutt, Clive Freeman and Lucy Letby, four imprisoned individuals for whom there is a mountain of exculpatory evidence, would be long dead.
According to some polls, including one directly following the Southport sentencing, a majority of British citizens now support the death penalty. One might think this was just for murder, but 5% also think it should be applicable for theft. Some radical feminists since the 1970s have been saying ‘all men are rapists’, and rape is often seen as serious as murder in common parlance: ‘murderers and rapists’.
Thus, if the death penalty were brought in for murder, why wouldn’t it also be for rape?
The problem is that through relabelling and redefinition rape has become a ‘new culture crime’, i.e. mutable, now rarely involving force or violence, and involving a person known to the complainant. There are many more highly-contested alleged marital rape and one night stand scenarios than violent stranger rapes (of the type which Andy Malkinson was wrongfully convicted in 2003).
So Andy Malkinson, given the slippery slope theory, would too be long-dead now; as well as his wrongfully convicted predecessor Victor Nealon, who also spent 17 years inside for a crime he didn’t commit.
Then, there is the humanitarian/Christian argument: the death penalty is instant oblivion, satisfying only the ‘eye for an eye’ principle (but no doubt giving some peace to the families of those murdered if that is their perspective).
For someone like Rudakubana, 17 years old when he committed the crimes and 18 when convicted, he will grow older with the full weight of what he has done on his conscience. If he is simply a violent psychopath without a conscience - an ‘evil monster’ in tabloid speak - the £50,000 per year keeping him alive in prison will indeed seem like a waste of money: but it is not enlightenment thinking to execute people just because they are killers without a conscience.
Acts do not often have true equivalence - some are far worse than others - but the value of human life does. This needs to be maintained as an absolute because if the death penalty only applies to child killers, then a 21 year-old female who kills her 15 year-old love rival in the heat of passion over an 18 year-old they’re both in love with will also be a ‘child killer’, liable to the death penalty. The slippery slope will be utilised by lawyers, because that’s what lawyers do.
DP enthusiasts will say ‘that will never happen’, but time and again we see things that were never supposed to happen, happen. Sentencing judges have a certain amount of leeway to decide on a case-by-base basis, but too much of this can lead to the ‘lawfare’ situation we see in news reports from the US, judges-with-grudges etc.
One of the biggest dangers of social media, and somewhere where the ‘populist’ tag does actually apply, is in making people more like pitchfork-wielding mobs than sober judges.
This is behind Keir Starmer supporting the jailing of emotionally reactive citizens in their responses to the Southport murders, but the fact that there is little to no evidence of SM posts actually leading to real life violence is important (and no I don’t mean ‘emotional violence’).
So when a nation is grieving the deaths of three little girls, and knowing their killer is (currently) unrepentant behind bars while costing them £50Kper year, the calls for ‘an eye for an eye’ are totally understandable.
But, the bureaucratic machinery of the law being what it is, bringing in the death penalty would mean wrongful executions - and we need to think how we’d feel if that happened to us or someone we loved.
By Sean Bw Parker
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