In Argentina electric wires are attached to the fingers, toes, and genitals of a prisoner and enough voltage is applied to cause severe pain. This is torture. In the United States electric wires are attached to the shaved head of a prisoner and enough voltage is applied to cause death. This is capital punishment.
What's the difference?
There is none in terms of human rights, according to Amnesty International (AI). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibits without reservation both torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment.
Not everyone agrees with AI's pronouncements on the death penalty, including some who consider themselves supporters of human rights and Amnesty International. To work to abolish torture is one thing. Even torturers won't defend torture. Performed in secret, officially denied, and eloquently denounced even by governments which have made it a science, there is a strong international consensus that it is wrong to deliberately inflict pain on a prisoner.
Killing prisoners is another matter. It all depends on how judicially it is done. Despite a U.N. resolution stating the desirability of abolition, 117 nations have written the death penalty into law. And in the past five years at least 60 have used that authority to wipe out thousands of individuals.
Far from being hidden, many such killings are announced in advance. Some take place in public, others in private ceremonies to which special observers are invited, as in the United States. Here the ritual has been enacted three times in the past four years and nearly 700 executions are now being prepared, apparently with majority support if not enthusiasm.
So why does Amnesty International jeopardize its work against political imprisonment and torture, practices which are universally condemned, by lumping them together with a practice many do not regard as a human rights violation at all?
Questions like this reveal that, rhetoric to the contrary, support for and understanding of human rights is still very weak. The arguments used to justify the death penalty, if valid, also justify political imprisonment and torture. Indeed, the death penalty does differ from torture. It is torture with a respectable face.
The legitimacy of the death penalty makes it possible to argue openly for the intellectual framework which makes political imprisonment and torture possible. If there are men and women who deserve the cruel treatment of the death penalty, why not men and women who deserve torture or who deserve to lose the right of free expression? Furthermore, public acceptance of the death penalty makes it easier to create the emotional climate which makes political imprisonment and torture likely. Thus each execution does more than violate the specific human rights of an individual. It threatens the basic human rights of us all.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty principally because it is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment. Oddly, this assertion is rarely contested. It isn't easy to argue that it is not cruel to kill in cold blood while arguing that killing is so cruel that the only appropriate punishment is death.
The cruelty is apparent in the methods of execution, which are extensions of common torture techniques: electric chair (electric shock), hanging, gas chamber (suffocation), amputation of the head (mutilation of the body), lethal injections (pharmaceutical torture), firing squad (placing a pistol to the head).
Some sensitive souls search for kinder ways to kill, but no technical solution can even touch the psychological terror of knowing the time of one's death in advance. As Camus put it so well:
Capital punishment is...the most premeditated of murders to which no criminal deed however calculated...can be compared....For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
The cruelty of the death penalty is seldom denied. Rather it is justified in the name of a greater social objective. This rationalization for state killing is virtually universal. Only the objective changes: preventing revolution (Iraq), protecting revolution (Ethiopia), stopping terrorism (South Africa), immorality (Iran), embezzlement (Soviet Union), drugs (Singapore), armed robbery (Nigeria), murder (United States).
And the same argument serves other ends. Violations of the individual by the state are always inflicted in the name of a higher cause, whether it is the arrest of dissenters in the Soviet Union to protect revolution, or their torture in Uruguay to prevent it. Americans who recoil in horror at the execution of Kurds in Iran or the torture of alleged revolutionaries in Argentina while demanding death for those convicted of murder in the United States are not reflecting different values; they are responding to a different threat. The threat may be criminal violence stemming from social disintegration rather than violence stemming from political instability, but in both cases those in power propose to solve the underlying problems by inflicting pain or death on selected human bodies.
In the case of criminal violence the proposition that executions deter murder is so demonstrably bankrupt, refuted by study after study, that death penalty advocates have come up with a new benefit: the demonstration of respect for life. This belief can be held only if one avoids comparing the respect for life in such death-penalty societies as Iran, South Africa, or Idi Amin's Uganda with abolitionist states such as Sweden, Costa Rica, or Holland. A recent study by William Bowers and Glen Pierce indicates that executions may increase rather than decrease the homicide rate, further evidence that in proclaiming that cruelty can be justified, the death penalty is a far greater social danger than any killer.
Another way to surmount the human rights problems involved in killing human beings is to deny that human beings are being killed; to argue that those executed have, by their crimes, lost the right to be seen as human beings. This argument can be, and is, broadly applied. Governments are forever imprisoning, torturing, or killing not men and women but communists or reactionaries, terrorists or counterrevolutionaries.
This process of transforming human beings into categories placed outside the human race, long an essential component of war, seems equally essential for violating human rights. In the United States this means viewing those on death row--a phrase which itself evokes images of a zoo or warehouse--as animals, subhuman killers, or monsters. Those who favor the extermination of such creatures respond with anger to mention of the condemned's family, hopes or fears, mental or emotional problems, or any other aspects of life not reducible to one despicable crime. Accusations of indifference to the victims of crime are designed to prevent the clear observation that those who commit even the worst acts are still human beings who have emerged from, been shaped by, and are part of the society to which we all belong, a society which if not directly responsible may at least be an accessory to the crime.
The acknowledgment that society is in some way implicated in the violent acts of its individual members is anathema to death penalty supporters, not because it does away with individual responsibility or the rationale for punishment, but because it removes the extreme self-righteousness, that sense of being without sin, which allows the assumption of the godlike power involved in the total extinction of a human personality.
The corollary of the notion that some deserve to die is that the state is qualified to judge who they are. Worldwide, however, states seem to disagree. Those committing offenses against the state lead a list which includes smugglers, traitors, homosexuals, robbers, murderers, profiteers, adulterers, drug dealers, subversives. Systems for determining just who is guilty of these offenses also vary widely, but despite differences in legislation and judicial systems, there is striking similarity in the result--in country after country, those who in fact die are drawn disproportionately from opposition groups, racial minorities, and the poor. This is not surprising. Juries and judges may act like God, but their judgment remains human.
Human rights violations simply do not lend themselves to equitable application. In fact, it is their infliction on minority groups, the dispossessed, or those depicted as a threat to the nation that allows governments some popular support for such acts. Governments which torture and murder can retain some support only as long as these measures are not perceived as a threat to all sectors of society, as demonstrated by the recent fall of governments in Iran and Nicaragua.
In the United States the almost exclusive imposition of the death penalty on the least powerful or most despised helps to explain the relative lack of public outcry over its use. Most on death row were marked for disposal long before they received a sentence. Bearing the mark of lifetimes of neglect or mental and emotional disturbance, hated as much for what they symbolize as for what they have done, they are easy to kill without creating much fuss.
International public opinion plays a key role in defending the human rights of those who cannot appeal for protection from their government or fellow citizens. Amnesty International, as part of its worldwide death penalty program, is seeking to mobilize this international opinion against executions in the United States.
AI has called on President Carter to recognize that the killing of prisoners is not a question of states' rights but of human rights by establishing a presidential commission which would examine all aspects of capital punishment: conflict with international and constitutional standards, deterrence, alternatives, and impact on the criminal justice system and indeed on all aspects of American life.
While the president cannot himself abolish the death penalty, he could call for a moratorium on all executions until such a study is completed and its findings presented to lawmakers and the public. The commission would be an important step, as it is elsewhere, toward abolition in the United States, and abolition here is a crucial step toward abolition worldwide.
The long-standing trend of the Western democratic nations toward elimination of the death penalty has accelerated recently, as demonstrated by the call of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe for total abolition. In Western Europe only France still executes. In 1979 Luxembourg, Norway, and Nicaragua abolished the death penalty completely, while Brazil and Peru are doing away with it in peacetime.
In contrast, there has been an alarming resurgence of executions in Iran, Liberia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and a continuation of widespread executions in the Soviet Union, Pakistan, South Africa, and China. This is the club the United States is joining by executing the nearly 700 who now await death in U.S. prisons.
Larry Cox was the press and information officer for Amnesty International, U.S.A. when this article appeared.
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