Ex-top Met cop Stevens opened his mouth again earlier today with disastrous results. The noises coming out of John's enormous gob coagulated, in the dank air surrounding his weatherbeaten and rapidly-ageing face, into a rabid demand that the British government should start hanging people at the earliest opportunity.
John Stevens, the same guy who told us that there were a squillion Al Qaeda terrorists hiding in London waiting to murder us in our beds, claims to have had a Pauline conversion on the issue of the death penalty.
Stevens claims that for 40 years he opposed the death penalty, but now that a police officer has been murdered in Yorkshire he supports it.
But why would this one police murder any more tragic than the dozens of others that have taken place over the last decade? If Stevens thought that the death penalty was wrong when WPC Yvonne Fletcher was murdered in 1984 and when PC Blakelock was murdered in Tottenham the following year, why does he think that it's AOK now? It's completely irrational.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Stevens' alleged Pauline conversion is just another poisonous lie, serving a rhetorical purpose, to follow the various other poisonous lies that have emerged from his ageing and cantankerous mouth.
That mouth has done enough damage to our country already, and it's time that Stevens learned to keep his poisonous opinions to himself.
If John Stevens isn't lying when he piously claims to have held a lifelong opposition to the death penalty, then he is clearly not mentally fit to get involved in this kind of public debate. In either instance, the media should not be giving this insidious little extremist a platform for his obscene and irrational views.
It's often said that people who have lost loved-ones to murder are the ones who should be listened to most in this kind of debate. I'm not sure that this is true, but as it happens, I lost someone I loved very much to a vicious murder not so long ago. The same people who often say that those who have lost loved ones should be listened to also seem quite keen to do the talking for us, and quite keen to assume that people like us want nothing more than to see one more human being gassed, eloctrocuted or strangled to death, or better still, killed slowly and chopped into little pieces.
Sorry, John, it just doesn't work that way. Plenty of people who've seen what death really means find your ideas on the death penalty disgusting and obscene.
So here's a life-lesson from the young to the decrepit:
Engage the BRAIN before you open your MOUTH and go saying things that are going to get yet more innocent people killed. Careless talk costs lives.
Now here's a six-word reminder, just for old-time's sake of why the death penalty is a very, very stupid idea:
Birmingham Six. Guildford Four. Winston Silcott.
Thousands of your police are liars just like you, John, and we know it. We know we can't trust them to tell the truth in court, even when someone's life is on the line. Now you may think that 10,000 dead Iraqis aren't enough. You may think that yet even innocent people getting murdered by the British government is a nice idea. But some of us aren't bedwetting sociopaths like you, even those of us who have seen loved ones murdered ourselves.
So next time you find yourself on the point of opening your mouth and pronouncing on a subject you know so little about, repeat this little six-word mantra to yourself, and everything will be OK. Birmingham Six. Guildford Four. Winston Silcott. AND RELAX....
And then once you've done that, think about your spiritual home, the State of Texas, where almost everyone who gets executed is not only poor but yes, you guessed it, BLACK. Think about the fact that the death penalty is, in practice, a nice big machine for killing ethnic minorities. Like that idea, do you, Johnny?
To everybody else, please let's work together to stop this madness. Where John Stevens goes, Tony Blair and the Tories soon follow. I can hear David Blunkett's dictaphone running right now, as he sketches out the "Big Idea" for his next all-expenses-paid keynote-speech: Time to Think The Unthinkable, David will say. Time For An Honest Debate About The Death Penalty. Shall we garotte them with cheesewire or tear out their internal organs with little hooks? Shall we hack them to death with machetes or herd them into gas chambers? And maybe David Cameron can join the fray too, with a little Tory working party on "rebranding Mediaeval justice".
John Stevens is trying to exploit the murder of an innocent woman for a disgusting piece of opportunist gameplaying. With the Blair cabal clearly intent on legalising torture, it was only a matter of time before the death penalty reared its ugly head again. These guys will not stop until they have destroyed everything that's decent about our country. It looks like the death penalty is next up...
Stevens claims that for 40 years he opposed the death penalty, but now that a police officer has been murdered in Yorkshire he supports it.
But why would this one police murder any more tragic than the dozens of others that have taken place over the last decade? If Stevens thought that the death penalty was wrong when WPC Yvonne Fletcher was murdered in 1984 and when PC Blakelock was murdered in Tottenham the following year, why does he think that it's AOK now? It's completely irrational.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Stevens' alleged Pauline conversion is just another poisonous lie, serving a rhetorical purpose, to follow the various other poisonous lies that have emerged from his ageing and cantankerous mouth.
That mouth has done enough damage to our country already, and it's time that Stevens learned to keep his poisonous opinions to himself.
If John Stevens isn't lying when he piously claims to have held a lifelong opposition to the death penalty, then he is clearly not mentally fit to get involved in this kind of public debate. In either instance, the media should not be giving this insidious little extremist a platform for his obscene and irrational views.
It's often said that people who have lost loved-ones to murder are the ones who should be listened to most in this kind of debate. I'm not sure that this is true, but as it happens, I lost someone I loved very much to a vicious murder not so long ago. The same people who often say that those who have lost loved ones should be listened to also seem quite keen to do the talking for us, and quite keen to assume that people like us want nothing more than to see one more human being gassed, eloctrocuted or strangled to death, or better still, killed slowly and chopped into little pieces.
Sorry, John, it just doesn't work that way. Plenty of people who've seen what death really means find your ideas on the death penalty disgusting and obscene.
So here's a life-lesson from the young to the decrepit:
Engage the BRAIN before you open your MOUTH and go saying things that are going to get yet more innocent people killed. Careless talk costs lives.
Now here's a six-word reminder, just for old-time's sake of why the death penalty is a very, very stupid idea:
Birmingham Six. Guildford Four. Winston Silcott.
Thousands of your police are liars just like you, John, and we know it. We know we can't trust them to tell the truth in court, even when someone's life is on the line. Now you may think that 10,000 dead Iraqis aren't enough. You may think that yet even innocent people getting murdered by the British government is a nice idea. But some of us aren't bedwetting sociopaths like you, even those of us who have seen loved ones murdered ourselves.
So next time you find yourself on the point of opening your mouth and pronouncing on a subject you know so little about, repeat this little six-word mantra to yourself, and everything will be OK. Birmingham Six. Guildford Four. Winston Silcott. AND RELAX....
And then once you've done that, think about your spiritual home, the State of Texas, where almost everyone who gets executed is not only poor but yes, you guessed it, BLACK. Think about the fact that the death penalty is, in practice, a nice big machine for killing ethnic minorities. Like that idea, do you, Johnny?
To everybody else, please let's work together to stop this madness. Where John Stevens goes, Tony Blair and the Tories soon follow. I can hear David Blunkett's dictaphone running right now, as he sketches out the "Big Idea" for his next all-expenses-paid keynote-speech: Time to Think The Unthinkable, David will say. Time For An Honest Debate About The Death Penalty. Shall we garotte them with cheesewire or tear out their internal organs with little hooks? Shall we hack them to death with machetes or herd them into gas chambers? And maybe David Cameron can join the fray too, with a little Tory working party on "rebranding Mediaeval justice".
John Stevens is trying to exploit the murder of an innocent woman for a disgusting piece of opportunist gameplaying. With the Blair cabal clearly intent on legalising torture, it was only a matter of time before the death penalty reared its ugly head again. These guys will not stop until they have destroyed everything that's decent about our country. It looks like the death penalty is next up...
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RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT
20.11.2005 16:41
ANTI-RANT
death penalty facts
20.11.2005 16:45
RACE OF DEFENDANTS EXECUTED IN THE U.S. SINCE 1976
BLACK
336
34%
HISPANIC
63
6%
WHITE
576
58%
OTHER
22
2.3%
Source: Death Penalty Information Center.
facts
death penalty: the real statistical facts
20.11.2005 17:34
Black people are in a minority in terms of the total population.
The real point statistically, is that state executions of black people are disproportionally represented in terms of the whole population - as a minority more black people are murdered by the state proportionally than the white majority!
learn some statistical analysis!
I stand corrected... (but rave on)
20.11.2005 19:10
So I was wrong to assert that "everyone who gets executed [in Texas] is not only poor but yes, you guessed it, BLACK". That's a gross exaggeration (sorry). But as the next commenter points out, even if it's true that the figure is 34%, that's still very disproportionate.
According to Wikipedia, African-Americans make up 12.9% of the US population. So this would mean that a black person is nearly THREE times more likely to be executed than the average American. And I've been told that Amnesty has identified similar trends towards this kind of disproportionate application of the death penalty against ethnic minorities in pretty much every country around the world that has it.
But actually, this is only one of the big concerns about the death penalty. The really big unanswerable issue is the fact that police officers all around the world, just like every other kind of human being, lie, and make mistakes, all the time.
That isn't to say that every police officer lies and makes mistakes all of the time, or even that every police officer lies/cocks up some of the time. I'm not saying that none of them are honest and competent. But I am saying that so many of them (including Stevens, in my view) are so dishonest and incompetent that we can't ever stake people's lives on the result of a police investigation. There's always got to be a chance to appeal if proof comes out of innocence later down the line.
Stevens knows that if we bring back the death penalty for police murders it'll only be a matter of time before we bring it back for all murders. This is the "Trojan horse" tactic. And he also knows that if we'd had just his narrower police-murders-only death penalty in the 80s, we'd have executed Winston Sillcott, whose conviction was eventually thrown out when it emerged that the police had fabricated a "confession" from him. I wonder what John Stevens was doing at the time...
And if we'd had the full-on death penalty that Stevens really wants to bring back, then of course the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six would all have been killed as well.
What really makes me sick is that we've had this argument in Britain, and settled it, time and time again, to the extent that, in my view at least, only someone who's being wilfully dishonest and/or irrational could keep making it. There's no such thing as a 100% safe conviction. We've got to stop pretending that it would ever be possible to have the death penalty without executing innocent people.
Some of the more cold-blooded death penalty cheerleaders accept that their system would end up killing innocent people, but argue that this is OK because it would save lives overall. But this doesn't work either because there's no evidence that the death penalty is any more of a deterrent than long-term imprisonment. As murderers tend not to be the most rational members of society, maybe this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. If a life sentence isn't going to be an effective deterrent, then it's to see what really will.
In fact if you look at countries, like the US, that have the death penalty, the murder rate is very often higher than here. One possible reason for this is that while the death penalty is no more effective than life imprisonment in deterring murders, it does help to deter murderers from giving themselves up in, the "cold light of day" after they've committed their crime. If a suspect knows they are likely to be executed if apprehended, then they are, arguably, rather more likely to kill in an attempt to avoid arrest.
Amnesty's argument is that the death penalty actually brutalises society and promotes a culture of violent revenge rather than calm, rational justice. When I compare American society with, say, Canada, this seems to make a lot sense.
So the bottom line is that reintroducing the death penalty wouldn't solve the problem it was supposedy intended to fix. It would just kill a lot of innocent people, create a whole lot more problems and make as a more irrational, brutalised society. John Stevens is not a completely stupid man - he must know all this. But he's still prepared to come out and say this kind of thing, and I can't help but feel that he's trying to exploit this very tragic Yorkshire police murder for a very cynical political purpose.
To be honest I'm not really sure what John Stevens thinks he's up to, but combined with all that fearmongering he was coming out with a few months ago, and combined with the way that senior police officers were roped into the debate about locking people up for 90 days without trial, I find it hard not to be suspicious of his agenda.
The media still seems to accord a kind of "elder statesman" respect to this guy, and attach enormous weight to his opinions. But I can't avoid the impression that he's playing demagogic politics - which may end up getting innocent people killed - and for that he deserves not respect but total contempt.
Hangum Floggum
For once I find myself agreeing with British foreign policy
20.11.2005 19:38
Death Penalty
"The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process" - Kofi Annan
What is Britain doing to bring about worldwide abolition of the death penalty?
The UK has abolished the death penalty for all crimes.
The UK has ratified Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights which abolishes the death penalty in most circumstances.
The UK has ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which bans the use of capital punishment;
The UK has ratified Protocol 13 of the ECHR, banning the use of the death penalty in all circumstances, including time of war.
During the UK's Presidency in 1998, the European Union agreed guidelines on the death penalty. These include criteria for making "demarches" (representations) to countries which retain the death penalty.
With our EU partners, the UK makes regular demarches in:
in individual cases which fall below minimum standards for the use of the death penalty (such as executing pregnant women, mentally retarded persons or those aged under eighteen at the time of the commission of the crime);
in situations where a government’s policy on the death penalty is in flux (for example when they are considering lifting a moratorium, or de facto moratorium, on the use of the death penalty);
In 1998, the FCO set up a Death Penalty Panel including expert academic, legal and NGO representatives. The Panel helps the Government draw up strategies towards the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.
The UK co-sponsors the annual EU resolution on the death penalty at the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.
The FCO is supporting projects aimed at increasing public awareness about the death penalty in various countries, including the US and the Caribbean, through its Human Rights Project Fund.
The FCO makes representations on behalf of any British national who is sentenced to death, anywhere in the world.
Common myths about the death penalty
"The death penalty is a deterrent"
This is not proven. Numerous studies have failed to establish that execution deters better than a long jail sentence. For example, the USA has the highest murder rate in the industrialised world, and rates are highest in Southern States where most executions occur.
"Murderers deserve no mercy"
All persons are entitled to full protection before the law and full observance of their human rights., including the right to a fair trial and the right to seek pardon or commutation of the sentence. Criminals must be brought to justice. But there are other means of doing this. And, with the death penalty, miscarriages of justice are irreversible.
The international community has agreed that even the worst offenders at the Rwandan and Yugoslav war crimes tribunals cannot face the death penalty. Criminals must be brought to justice. But there are other means of doing this.
"Most countries have the death penalty"
Not so. In 2002, 111 countries had ended capital punishment in law or practice. Only 84 retain it, and many of those have moratoriums*. The international consensus is now moving towards abolition.
"Most people want the death penalty"
Poll after poll finds that the more people know about the death penalty - and possible alternatives to execution - the more public support for the death penalty drops. That is why Britain works to encourage more debate about the death penalty in countries which retain it.
Hangum Floggum
Homepage:
http://www.fco.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1065715424996
Birmingham Six. Guildford Four. Winston Silcott David Bentley
20.11.2005 22:14
A rooftop chase followed.
When unarmed Craig was captured and guntoting Bentley was cornered and police were calling on Bentley to first surrender the gun and then himself, police asked Craig to call on Bentley to hand over the gun"Let him have it, David" shouted Craig.
At this point there was a volley of shots and one police officer fell dead.
Craig and Bentley were tried for and found guilty of murder.
Police denied asking Craig to shout anything and said that he had called on Bentley to fire.
Bentley said he fired in panic when the police fired at him.
Craig was 17 years old - too young for the death penalty.
He got life and served 20 years.
Bentley was 18 years old and was hanged.
The jury were never told that the bullet from Bentleys gun was never found and that forensic tests showed that the dead police officer was killed by a police bullet.
It was 40 years later that research revealed that the dead policemans widow remarried shortly afterwards - to one of the police who were on the roof that night and with whom she had been having an affair for several years.
Yet David Bentley died amid public opprobrium because of police lies to provide the sort of unequivocal evidence to which Lord Stevens refers.
And a cop-killing cop and serial killer got away with it, living on his police pension until his death in the 1980s.
Gerard Mulholland
e-mail:
gerard.mulholland@noos.fr
Birmingham Six. Guildford Four. Winston Silcott. David Bentley.
20.11.2005 22:21
Sorry I mixed the names up ! This is the correct version: -
In 1950 two youths called David Bentley and Christopher Craig were surprised by police in the course of an armed burglary in London.
A rooftop chase followed.
When unarmed Bentley was captured and guntoting Craigwas cornered and police were calling on Craig to first surrender the gun and then himself, Police asked Bentley to call on Craig to hand over the gun. "Let him have it, Chris" shouted Bentley.
At this point there was a volley of shots and one police officer fell dead.
Craig and Bentley were tried for and found guilty of murder.
Police denied asking Craig to shout anything and said that he had called on Bentley to fire.
Bentley said he fired in panic when the police fired at him.
Craig was 17 years old - too young for the death penalty.
He got life and served 20 years.
Bentley was 18 years old and was hanged.
The jury were never told that the bullet from Craigs gun was never found and that forensic tests showed that the dead Police Officer was killed by a police bullet.
It was 40 years later that research revealed that the dead Policemans widow remarried shortly afterwards - to one of the Police who were on the roof that night and with whom she had been having an affair for several years.
Yet David Bentley died amid public opprobrium because of Police lies to provide the sort of “cast-iron” evidence to which Lord Stevens refers.
And a cop-killing cop and serial killer got away with it, living on his Police Pension until his death in the 1980s.
Gerard Mulholland
Statistical Reality
21.11.2005 08:12
Could that by any chance be due to the fact that statistically black people are disproportionality represented as perpetrators of violent criminality?
Something along the lines of being 14 times more likely to commit street robbery where violence is used against the person, and 8 times more likely to commit rape and homicide.
Therefor statistically both in the US and the UK, Blacks aren't stopped enough, and aren't arrested and convicted enough, when you look at the nature and volume of offences they commit statistically against a population demography.
Whether this is because of blacks often being marginalised by society and ghettoised and suffering frustration/lack of employment/associated despair/mental health problems as a result of being excluded or whether its because of a racial commitment to crime (low impulse control threshold as a factor of genetic make up) depends on whether you are a right or left winger I suppose. The reality is its probably a mixed bag of factors.
Rather then turning the death penalty into a race issue, it should be argued on a rights issue.That there is never any justification for taking the life of another, apart from as a last resort of self defence or protection of another in an immediate situation, and never for the state to do post arrest to someone who has been contained and no longer an immediate threat.
Carlton C
Winston Silcott
21.11.2005 08:25
Whether you think he did this or not, he still served time for the stabbing of 24-year-old Boxer, Anthony Smith to death in 1984.
Much like Mumia Abu Jamal, you are looking at violent criminals that have been used in left wing propaganda to argue against specific inequalities in the criminal justice system, but where the people used are hardly 'innocent victims' of the system.
Lets face it, the reason the left wingers support Silcott and support mumia is because they have murdered cops, not because you believe in their innocence of the crimes they were accused of.
There are many black people in the criminal justice system who have been wrongly convicted or subject to racism at all levels of the system, so perhaps in future finding real cases of perversion of justice to fight, rather then supporting those that are just propaganda pieces of the extremists on the far left.
alice mack
Stats and Silcott etc
21.11.2005 13:28
As for other question about certain ethnic groups being more likely to end up in front of a judge, that's also true - in fact it's a central part of the issue. Certainly in the US, black people are not merely more likely to be executed - they are more likely than a white person to get stopped by the police, more likely to get arrested when stopped, more likely to get charged when arrested, more likely to face prosecution when charged, more likely to be convicted when prosecuted, more likely to be condemned to death when convicted, and less likely to be given clemency following a death sentence, than any other ethnic minority. The discrimination is endemic. At every step of the way, the authorities treat black people differently from their white (and hispanic and Asian) compatriots. The same is true, at least to some extent here. And the reason is simple. Police, prosecutors, defence lawyers, judges and juries are just as prone to racism as the rest of us.
Of course some people sign up to the kind of ideology which holds that certain ethnic groups are inherently more criminal than others, but the basis of that idea is, in reality, the very human tendency to stereotype others rather than any rational proof. Although the racial-eugenic theories that tried to give an intellectual to that idea have been completely discredited (they simply don't add up as scientific theories), the remnants of these theories are still, of course, very current in many Western and post-colonial societies including our own, as evidenced by the comments above.
What's true almost universally, however, is that among the very poorest members of every society, ethnic minorities tend to be massively over-represented. This isn't true for every ethnic minority, but it is true in general. A disproportionate number of black people in this country are poorer than average. There's an even greater inequality in the US. And in continental Europe, people of North African origin are massively more likely to be poor than other than other ethnic groups.
The same is true in Thailand, with members of non-Thai ethnic groups like the Akha and Hmong, as well as the Burmese and Cambodian immigrants. The same is true in Japan with the Korean immigrant population. And in all of these countries, members of all these ethnic groups are massively over-represented in the crime statistics.
Racial discrimination may not be the only reason that, in any given society, minority ethnic groups are statistically more likely to end up in poverty, but in a great many societies (including, arguably our own) it's an important factor. For first generation immigrants there are usually also simple practical obstacles to economic success - lack of familiarity with the language and customs of mainstream society, for example.
And given that social mobility has always been more of a myth than a reality, once inequality has set in it can take many generations to overcome. Whatever your ethnic background, if your parents are poor then you're more likely to be poor. Doesn't mean it's impossible to "work your way up", but it is more difficult than if your parents could afford to give you a top-notch education and subsidise your lifestyle until you're ready to make money of your own.
To say that poverty is a factor in causing criminality is not to say that poverty is an excuse for criminality - but it seems irrational to deny that there's a connection. In simple economic terms, poor people have more to gain and, arguably, less to lose from crime than the average member of society, and they are also more desperate. Plenty of people face extraordinary hardship and refuse all opportunities to turn to crime - but of course not every human being is able to resist the temptation - and poverty makes that temptation much greater.
Of course we should do everything we can to deter crime - without making things worse - but the death penalty is no more effective than any other deterrent, and it has a whole lot of other very negative consequences for society.
If we really want to protect the public (and personally I doubt if the demagogic, self-advancing John Stevens has any genuine interest in doing that), then we should tackle poverty rather than dragging our society into some kind of Texas-style killing frenzy.
HF
sorting out the facts
21.11.2005 22:10
As a result of
a) Prejudice
b) They are more likely to be on the radio as a suspect, as a result of being disproportionately involved in crime.
c) Bit of both
"more likely to get arrested when stopped"
So in other words, the stops of blacks are more likely to be justified (i.e more often result in an arrest).
"more likely to get charged when arrested"
So in other words, more likely that when they are arrested that there is compelling evidence of guilt - prosecutors don't like charging cases unless there is reasonably strong evidence as they don't like to loose cases as it costs the taxpayer money.
"more likely to face prosecution when charged"
Again, prosecutors discard cases that are too weak to proove, again hinting that blacks are more likely to be involved in criminality.
"more likely to be convicted when prosecuted"
And therefore, yet another indicator they are disproportionately involved in crime.
"more likely to be condemned to death when convicted"
So more likely to have committed a particularly heinous murder, or more likely to live in a death penalty state or be a repeat felon.
"and less likely to be given clemency following a death sentence"
ditto
again
the facts etc.
22.11.2005 17:36
We can try to explain it with generalisations about police, judges etc. being PARTICULARLY more racist than the rest of us, or we can simply put it down to the fact that all human beings have a tendency to racism and stereotyping. But either way, that's the outline, and those are some possible explanations...
Now obviously some people think it's a good thing that the judicial system is endemically discriminatory towards ethnic minorities, but as noted above there's no rational basis for holding such a view.
HF