Laying down the law

The US death penalty is illegal. When a British citizen faces this form of punishment it is our responsibility to protect them.

The Observer recently published an article highlighting the plight of Neil Revill, an Englishman accused of double murder in LA and potentially facing the death penalty. The case against him appears fairly weak - there were no eyewitnesses, no confession and no murder weapon was found. He has no previous convictions, and one of the murder victims has been shown to be a police informant responsible for the arrest of mafia figures in LA. Yet despite all this, Revill faces the likelihood of conviction and the death penalty.

The manner in which the death penalty is carried out in America has changed over the years with more "humane" methods available for taking human life. There has been much debate as to whether the American constitution allows for such punishment to be given in the first place. The eighth amendment sets out that "cruel and unusual punishment" may not be inflicted. This has been held to protect people from removal of limbs and beatings with chains, amongst other things. These forms of punishment, though horrific in the eyes of modern western culture, do not deprive a person of his life. Regardless of how cruel they may be, a person will survive such treatment and be able to continue to live.

In 1958 the supreme court ruled in the case of Trop v Dulles that deprivation of citizenship for an army deserter violated the eighth amendment, but clarified this by saying that the death penalty did not do so because it has been used so widely throughout history that it cannot be classified as being unusual nor cruel. This again shows the ironic notion put forward by pro-death penalty advocates that a punishment will only be cruel if a person is alive after such treatment and has to deal with its consequences.

The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) brought a number of cases against the death penalty in the 1960s. In one case, Furman v Georgia, Brennan J held that the eighth amendment protects against degradation of dignity, arbitrariness and unacceptable and excessive punishments. It seems obvious, to this writer as well as various supreme court justices, that the death penalty violates all of these conditions.

Aside from the legal arguments, there have been a number of studies showing the discriminatory manner in which the death penalty is applied in various states. The probability of being sentenced to death increases where the victim was white, and increases further if the accused is non-white. This arbitrariness can be used to show that the death penalty is indeed an unusual punishment. The only way to rebut this argument would be to make this sentence mandatory for certain offences; a method which has been tried and which subsequently failed because it did not allow for individualised sentencing.

Even if all these arguments were not sufficient to overturn the use of the death penalty by certain American States, an argument using the 14th amendment, the right to liberty, could be put forward. If a country is constitutionally bound to protect the liberty of all persons, surely this would require their lives to be protected from removal by the hands of the state.

I do not believe that I can overturn decades of death penalty jurisprudence through one article alone. However, when a British citizen is being threatened with such punishment and taking Neil Revill circumstances into account, the flaws of the legality of such a sentence must be understood.

It is a basic legal concept that if a person commits a crime abroad they may be prosecuted and extradited to serve their sentence in their home country, or they may serve out their incarceration in the place where they were convicted. However, the fact that a country imposes a punishment which goes against its own constitution, and is therefore illegal, is something which should be addressed when a foreign national faces such a sentence. If a British woman were to accuse a man of rape in Pakistan, and the traditional punishment of rape by elders of the community were to be imposed against her, there would be public outcry. Just because America is a western country does not mean we must blindly accept the punishments that they mete out to British citizens, especially when such sentences are in excess of their powers under their own legal system.

The organisation Reprieve is fighting to have the death penalty removed as an option in the case against Neil Revill. Tony Blair has been petitioned to put diplomatic pressure on the LA prosecutors to comply with this request. It is our responsibility to ensure that the rule of law is upheld and that Britons are protected from illegal punishments within jurisdictions where they are accused of committing a crime.