EDITORIAL : Slow but steady road to abolition

EDITORIAL : Slow but steady road to abolition

TAIPEI TIMES, Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009, Page 8

Monday’s forum on the death penalty was eclipsed by a series of cross-strait forums and meetings, an unexpected memorandum of understanding and the continued warnings of mad-cow fearmongers. Unlike cross-strait relations, the economy and even US beef, the debate over capital punishment offers scant political currency for either political camp.

That is both a curse and a blessing for the anti-death penalty movement.

Topics with potential to galvanize voters are most likely to motivate political parties and their lawmakers, spark mainstream debate and receive continual coverage from Taiwan’s highly politicized media. At the same time, the greater a subject’s political currency, the less chance there is of rational discussion.

Thus, even an ostensibly non-political matter like US beef imports has spurred legislators, local government heads and civic groups into action, with boycotts, referendum proposals, promises of legislation and countless op-eds. Anti-death penalty activists can hardly expect such an outpouring over their concerns.

Yet neither of the two matters at hand in the beef furor — public health and whether the Cabinet had a responsibility to seek legislative or public consensus before signing the protocol — has been addressed. Politicos are too busy feeding, and feeding off of, the public’s fears.

In other words, becoming a pet cause is not necessarily conducive to good legislation or policymaking.

Compared with such impassioned and politicized debates, the death penalty discussion is slow and low-profile — and perhaps that is why it has been so successful. Working to spare convicted murderers from the gallows, the position of death penalty opponents is not a popular one, but their progress is measurable. They are, in fact, halfway to their goal.

Taiwan has not carried out an execution in almost four years and has removed all mandatory death sentences from the law books and reduced the number of laws punishable by death. Abolition is near, yet far.

The greatest challenge facing the anti-death penalty movement today is how to engage the public and lawmakers in a question that is low on their list of concerns and that, for the latter group, promises few if any political benefits. It is an uphill battle, but may be inescapable. Although most countries that have abolished the death penalty have done so without public support — in the name of upholding human rights — Taiwan’s government continues to balk at this option.

NGOs working to stop the death penalty have had success communicating with the former and current administrations, but the government — both under President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his predecessor — has made no moves to introduce a formal moratorium on executions, to commute death sentences or to propose abolishing capital punishment. Its consistent defense has been the lack of public support.

But is public support necessary? As British criminologist Roger Hood, who spoke at Monday’s forum, wrote in this paper the same day, experience shows that support for the death penalty wanes once it has been abolished.

“In the generations thereafter, it comes to be regarded as an unacceptable, uncivilized cruelty of the past,” he wrote.

In the process of granting women suffrage in the US or ending racial segregation in the US south, what was once condoned — state-enforced discrimination against women and blacks — is today regarded as “unacceptable” and “uncivilized.”

In Taiwan, it seems the death penalty will survive on the books until public opinion has shifted. Proponents of abolition have their work cut out for them in the face of apathetic lawmakers and a public debate dominated by political and economic concerns.

Although change may seem distant, the progress thus far seems to indicate that abolitionists will eventually succeed.