Why is the death sentence considered to be an unacceptable punishment in the Council of Europe, while life imprisonment is not?

Question

I've always been baffled at the Council of Europe fight against the death sentence: on the one hand you have the rights of the prisoner and how a death sentence is too harsh for any crime. On the other hand it's considered to be perfectly okay to send someone to prison for life or for 20+ years, which is often a lifetime sentence anyway. If I were a convicted criminal, I'm pretty sure I'd rather just get the death penalty rather than living in miserable conditions for the rest of my life. Even more so in countries where the penitentiary system is not known for its great facilities.

So what's the rationale for attempting to eradicate the death sentence? Isn't it practically speaking a much more humane punishment than a long prison sentence?

Edit: while the current answers are certainly interesting, I would like to know the official rationale by the Council of Europe, not what the US or other government entities think about it.

Answer 1

There are actually several points that make it different:

1. The European charter of fundamental rights states in its very first article that human dignity is inviolable. (Just like the German Basic Law btw.) This automatically forbids any action of the state taking the life of any human being as a form of sanction.

2. Also people on death row usually wait for several years before the sentence is carried out and that is deemed as violating human dignity as well. If you sit there years waiting for your execution that is deemed as damaging as torture.

3. The criminal system can and does fail. There are several well documented cases of people being treated unjustly by the system and even falsely convicted for crimes they did not commit. You can release someone whom you imprisoned for life. You can't release someone you executed, you can just bury him.

4. Because even lifetime imprisonment is not what it says. The ECJ (European Court of Justice) ruled that it is unconstitutional to imprison a person for life without the chance of parole. You might be imprisoned for a very long time, but there always has to be the chance of parole.

5. The idea behind the justice system in Europe is not only to punish an offender. It is twofold: first it should protect the public from a dangerous individual and, second, it should try to educate that individual to return to a lawful life - and you can't re-educate a dead person. You can however grant him parole if he improves while imprisoned.

Answer 2

I can answer this from the US angles, which largely mirrors the European thinking. Stats from this Wikipedia entry

1. The justice system sometimes fails. There are people unwilling to accept a system that could execute an innocent person. 157 people sentenced to death in the US have been exonerated since 1973.
2. Death penalty cases largely mirror life sentences anyways. The average time on Death Row is about 15 years. 20-to-life is not that far off.
3. There's no truly "kind" way to execute someone. While lethal injection has been favored of late, several high profile problems, as well as difficulty in procuring drugs have cast doubts on the ability of some states to execute people.

Answer 3

I see your point but this has its origins in how the penal code is conceived in the European history of law.
Basically from Hegel onwards, the law has been thought of not as something that is supposed to extract revenge on the criminal, because at its base you can not undo a crime that has been done.
The function of the law, especially the penal code, is then to provide justice in moral terms, since it can not provide it in material terms. Very broadly speaking, the very first condition of this moral justice is that both parties are considered as having equal capacity to be responsible. This idea of responsibility necessitate the existence of the faculty of reason which is associated, wrongly it may be, with humans.

If the State is considered as a rational entity, killing another rational entity, a criminal, should also be considered as a crime, since the role of the law is to provide moral justice which necessitates the existence of both of the parties, and killing effectively makes one party disappear, and thus obstructs the exercise of moral justice. If the State is just, meaning it has the necessary legitimacy to exercise moral justice, it should not be doing injustice. Thus the death penalty is considered an injustice done by the State which is supposed to be the protector of justice, whereas life sentences are not, because it doesn't act in order to negate the existence of one or more rational parties.

I would recommend reading the section on morality and law of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences of G. Hegel for further and more detailed inquiries. My exposition here depends mostly on my lectures of it which date from almost 6 years ago, so I probably made some mistakes along the way.

Answer 4

In a way, you are looking at the problem "upside down".

I quote from your question:

If I were a convicted criminal

At this point, you are not: you are just a burden on the society. The first priority thus is not doing what's better for you, but what's better from the others.

Once you do something so "big" to be either sentenced to life (or multiple sentences to life) or to a possible execution, you don't matter anymore. What matter is to deal with you in a way that's okay for the society morale and conscience.

killing a human being is considered morally acceptable and better than to cage him like a beast (see a comment to your question)? Then you get beheaded.

killing a human being is considered acceptable when done in a painless way? Then you get a fatal injection, and when it's discovered that it is not so painless then death sentence come into doubt.

killing a human being is considered totally unacceptable? Then you get jailed for life. And your rights as a prisoner again are given accordingly to the common morale.

It's more or less the same kind of argument that goes up in the scale from meat eaters to fully vegan: basically it's not a matter of doing something better for the convicted (has someone really asked chickens if they prefer to be eaten, caged for eggs or just let extinguish?), but for the rest of the society. You, as a sentenced, are nothing more than a problem to solve and for us to confront with; you already killed yourself, now we just have to decide what to do with your shell.

Answer 5

You may be right in that, assuming a particularly nasty crime, death is more humane than thirty years in a maximum security lockup. Here in the US, football player/murderer Aaron Hernandez took a look at life in prison, and concluded that checking out of life was the better way.

However, there is an image factor to be considered. Lock someone up, and it's out of sight, out of mind. When the state deliberately kills someone, it's a more contentious activity, far easier to casually visualize. I suspect some of the anti-death penalty sentiment is based on that and the generally dark ages nature of the state deliberately killing another human, especially in this day and age of superficial judgments and visceral images.

What with DNA technology and extensive appeals, the chance of an erroneous execution is fairly slight today.

Ironically, in the US, it's cheaper to imprison for life than to execute. The extensive appeals run into a couple of million dollars in legal action.

Answer 6

It depends on the different legal culture of Europe in comparison with the one of United States. After the horrors of World War II and how Nazi-fascism applied the death penalty that - I recall - in some countries was still in force until a few decades ago, European jurists wanted to give a strong signal of respect for human life "at all costs". Also in a few European countries, perhaps in none, the "prison for life" penalty is actually led to the death of the condemned. In almost all European countries there are provisions for reviewing the proceedings and often the convicted person is granted freedom after 15 or 20 years of imprisonment. In Italy, for example, "prison for life" penalty has been abolished and the maximum penalty that can be imposed is 30 years. But in fact the prisoners leave prison after 20 years or less. This is bad, because I'm convinced that for some crimes there can be no forgiveness, but I am a person with many contradictions. Often, looking at what's happening in the United States (and I'm referring to the chronicles of executions outside the jails) I thank you for living in a community with laws better than my moods. I was really impressed by the film "death man walking". I think that everyone should see it and find pity - not forgiveness - for those found guilty of tremendous crimes, and the character portrayed by Susan Sarandon may become a model for that. In the death there is no possibility of redemption. While there will be always - and I mean it - room for mistakes.