PENALTY

favoured the death penalty, though for the more serious crimes, rather
than for nonviolent offences. 27
It seems likely that it is the intellectual, legal and administrative elites
that are slowing the pace of reform in China, not the masses, and it is
the legal practitioners and political leaders who need to embrace the
human rights objections to capital punishment.
DETERRENCE AND PUBLIC OPINION:
NO BARRIERS TO ABOLITION
The empirical research conducted over the past few decades demonstrates
that no matter what politicians argue or the public believe,
neither deterrence nor public opinion should be seen as barriers to
abolition. At the seminars and meetings that we have attended in
China, people who work within the criminal justice system often say
that the public will not tolerate abolition while the crime rate is high,
for fear it will lead to further rises in serious crimes, especially drug
trafficking and corruption. The evidence on deterrence discussed
above suggests that this is not likely to be the case. Furthermore,
the public opinion studies we have reviewed for the forthcoming
fifth edition of The Death Penalty suggest that there is no immutable
relationship between rising levels of homicide and increased support
for the death penalty. Much will depend on the extent to which citizens
believe in the general deterrent power of executions, their faith
in alternative punishments, and the ability of the political system to
tackle the roots of the problem through social reforms and a criminal
justice approach that increases the certainty, rather than the severity,
of punishment. In none of the countries that we have studied do the
data suggest that there would be disastrous consequences for public
order and respect for the law if the death penalty were abolished and
replaced by a (humane) sentence of life imprisonment.
The experience of nearly all abolitionist countries is that opinions
change and support for capital punishment withers as it comes to be
seen as a thing of the past. Analysis of support for the death penalty
across 17 countries 28 came to two interesting conclusions. First, it
found that “residence in a retentionist nation significantly increases
the odds of an individual supporting the death penalty.” This suggests
that people on the whole support what has been the norm in their
culture. Second, each year of abolition lowered the odds that an individual
would support the death penalty by 46 per cent. 29 Clearly, as
the example of Europe shows, when the death penalty has been abolished,
more and more citizens come in time to regard it as a cruel and
outdated punishment. Abolition can lead to previously unimagined
changes in opinion by creating a different climate for the discourse on
the limits of state punishment. France provides an obvious example
of this. François Mitterrand stood for election in 1981 on a manifesto
that included abolition of the death penalty despite 63 per cent of
the general public being in favour of it. He was elected president,
and after abolition he was re-elected. This showed that the public
was ready to accept leadership on this issue; subsequently, France has
become one of the leading nations to protest against capital punishment
around the world.
Opinions about capital punishment also differ in different sectors of
the population—which may be related to their social status, their
political or religious beliefs and how well they are informed about
the issue, including what the effects of abolition might be. Ultimately,
public opinion on the death penalty—essentially an expression of
superficial sentiment by the electorate, who may or (as is more usual)
may not be aware of all the facts and arguments relating to the issue—
should not be allowed to determine an issue which many, indeed now
the majority of countries, believe must be dealt with on the basis of a
principled interpretation of human rights.
CONCLUSION
Those governments that still favour capital punishment in principle
or believe that it is necessary pay insufficient attention to human
rights protections, such as due process safeguards to reduce the
risk of executing those who are innocent or otherwise wrongly
27 R. Hood, “Introduction”, in Research Survey on the Death Penalty in China, 2007-9, available
from www.gbcc.org.uk/files/documents/dp2introduction.pdf.
28 Steven Stack, “Public opinion on the death penalty: analysis of individual-level data from 17
nations”, International Criminal Justice Review, vol. 14 (2004), pp. 69–98.
29 Ibid., pp. 87–88.
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