Capital Punishment and the Media Slant on the Topics

Teryck Taylor

Media 3

October 29, 2003

Word count 2,821

Capital punishment

Capital punishment and the media Slant on the topics

The media's attitude to executions varies widely depending on the age and sex of the criminal, the type of crime and method of execution.

Middle aged men being executed by lethal injection in Texas for "ordinary" murders hardly rate a paragraph in the US press nowadays and do not get a mention in the U. K. media at all.

However a woman convicted of double murder and being injected on the same thing gets tremendous world wide media attention at all levels. Karla Faye Tucker this so call Christian. Who used a pick axe to kill people before being put to sleep she apologize for her sins and to her family. Equally a man being hanged in Washington or Delaware or shot by a Utah firing squad makes international news. (Wesley Allan Dodd, 1989 arrest in Washington State for the murder of 3 young boys ended his 15 year career of violent sex crimes. John Taylor murder of 6 women while sleeping. And yet women being hanged in Jordan (3 in 1997 and 2 in 1998), the 126 people publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia during 2000 and men and women executed by the hundred in China for a wide variety of offences make very little news.

Why is this? Do we not care if the execution takes place in a Middle Eastern or Far Eastern Country? Are their criminals somehow perceived as lesser people with fewer rights? The media obviously does not judge many of these stories to be newsworthy although they are aware of them through the news wires from those countries (which is how I know about them). In Singapore when executions were reported, they typically only made a small article and aroused very little public interest. Most Singaporeans however firmly support the government hard line on crime and punishment.

During the late 70's and early 80's when executions were rare in America, every execution, by whatever means, attracted a great deal of media interest and yet now they are frequent (averaging over 1 per week) the authorities seem to have difficulty in finding sufficient official and media witnesses. They also used to attract pro and anti capital punishment protesters in large numbers but these seem to have dwindled down to just a few in most cases.

I tend to think that if executions were televised they would soon reach the same level of disinterest amongst the general public unless it fitted into a "special category" i.e. a first by this or that method or a particularly interesting criminal.

Is media coverage of executions just a morbid side show for some people, who deprived of public hangings etc., lap up every detail the media, has to offer, whilst the majority ignore the not very interesting criminals who are executed by lethal injection?

Lethal injection as my own survey has shown is perceived by most respondents as the least cruel method - probably because it is least interesting (sexy?) way of executing someone - a state of affairs that suits many States in America very well. The less the public interest, the easier the process becomes.

Probably the majority of people don't much care either way and would rather watch football. They may vaguely support capital punishment but do not wish to be or feel involved.

However there are Pro and con to the Death Penalty

Arguments for the death penalty:

 Incapacitation of the criminal.

Capital punishment permanently removes the worst criminals from society and should prove much cheaper and safer for the rest of us than long term or permanent incarceration. It is self evident that dead criminals can not commit any further crimes, either within prison or after escaping or being released from it.

 Cost

Money is not an inexhaustible commodity and the state may very well better spend our (limited) resources on the old, the young and the sick rather than the long term imprisonment of murderers, rapists etc.

Anti capital punishment campaigners in America sight the higher cost of executing someone over life in prison but this is (whilst true for America) has to do with the endless appeals and delays in carrying out death sentences that are allowed under the American legal system where the average time spent on death row is over 11 years. In Britain in the 20th century the average time in the condemned cell was less than 8 weeks and there was only one appeal.

 Retribution.

Execution is a very real punishment rather than some form of "rehabilitative" treatment, the criminal is made to suffer in proportion to the offence. Although whether there is a place in a modern society for the old fashioned principal of "lex talons" (an eye for an eye) is a matter of personal opinion. Retribution is seen by many as an acceptable reason for the death penalty, according to my survey results.

 Deterrence.

Does the death penalty deter? It is hard to prove one way or the other because in most retentionist countries the number of people actually executed per year (as compared to those sentenced to death) is usually a very small proportion. It would however seem that in those countries (e.g. Singapore) which almost always carry out death sentences there is generally far less serious crime. This tends to indicate that the death penalty is a deterrent, but only where execution is an absolute certainty.

Anti death penalty campaigners always argue that death is not a deterrent and usually site studies based upon American states to prove their point. This is, in my view, flawed and probably chosen to be deliberately misleading. Let us examine the situation in three countries.

Britain.

In Britain, between abolition in 1965 and 1998, the murder rate more than doubled (to around 750 per annum) and there have been 71 murders committed by people who have been released after serving "life sentences" in the same period, according to Home Office statistics. Statistics were kept for the 5 years that capital punishment was suspended in Britain (1965 - 1969) and these showed a 125% rise in murders that would have attracted a death sentence. Whilst statistically all this is true it does not tell one how society has changed over the those 34 years. It may well be that the murder rate would be the same today if we had retained