Final appeals for clemency on behalf of the condemned murderer Karla Faye Tucker have been rejected as she faces execution in a Texas jail tonight, the first woman to be executed in that state since the Civil War and only the second in the United States in recent years.
Attention has focused particularly on the case because she is an attractive woman who has outgrown her crime, married a prison chaplain and become a convert to evangelical Christianity. These are, no doubt, compelling arguments. But they do not diminish the fundamental case that crime is demonstrably not deterred nor criminals redeemed by this barbarian form of punishment. It is a lamentable lapse of standards which sees such executions in the United States recur so often to brutalise public discussion of these issues throughout the civilised world. Comparative research shows that China far outstrips other states in its use of capital punishment, followed by Ukraine, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia and then the US. In several of these states it is used not only for murder but for a number of other crimes as well - as used to be the case in Britain, Ireland and other European states until well into this century. It is hardly an auspicious list of countries; and it does not sit comfortably with the annual survey of human rights provisions around the world published by the US State Department. In fact the number of executions in the US has been increasing over the last two decades, since 1976 when the death penalty was reintroduced after a brief four-year respite, and nowhere as fast as in Texas, largely because it has speeded up legal procedures involved in the appeal system. Public attitudes have been driven by the sharp increase in violent crime figures and a growing conviction that punishments should fit the crimes, especially the most violent murders among them. It is shared across parties and increasingly, although by no means universally, across the United States.
Nonetheless the research persistently shows that those states with the death penalty do not have lower levels of criminality, including murder, than those without it. If anything they have higher ones. In Canada the murder rate peaked before abolition of the death penalty and declined after it. Homicides tend to go up not down after executions. Only a small proportion of convicted murderers are executed in the US, mostly the poorest and least well educated. So much for the deterrent value of this most cruel, inhumane and degrading form of punishment. As for redemption, it is not dreamt of in this philosophy. It follows that Karla Faye Tucker's execution will go ahead later today. This is despite the remarkable coalition of voices raised against it, precisely on the grounds that she has expiated the crime committed with her boyfriend in 1983, the exceptionally horrible killing of a biker and his girlfriend with pickaxes. They include liberals and feminists, but also evangelical Christians, prison guards and an impressive list of international figures and organisations. There seems no prospect, alas, that their pleas will be acted upon. But they will certainly not have been in vain, since their campaign has brought it home to many people in Texas and beyond who are not normally open to such arguments that people may indeed forswear even murder and change their lives while in detention.