Dog-whistle politics and the futility of the death penalty

Duncan Campbell’s excellent article on the death penalty could not, of course, cover everything (Dear Lee Anderson: Derek Bentley was innocent and hanged. We scrapped the death penalty for a reason, 9 February).

One of the unexpected consequences of bringing back the death penalty will be that fewer murderers will be convicted – even though they are guilty and the jury knows they are guilty.

Consider the case of Madeline Smith from Glasgow who killed her lover, Pierre Emile L’Angelier, in 1857. He stood in the way of her making a socially and financially advantageous marriage, so she poisoned him with arsenic. Scots Victorian juries are not known for being wet liberals, but the jury members could not live with the thought that they would be responsible for the death of this beautiful, vivacious young woman (she was 22 years old).

They could not find her “not guilty”, so they opted for a verdict only available in Scots law and found the case “not proven”. Smith walked free from the court.

Over the years, many other juries have refused to convict murderers because it would lead to a sentence of death.
Dr Tom Wilkie
Cambridge

• The death penalty has a “100% success rate”, said the new Tory deputy chairman, Lee Anderson. In the US, 1,564 people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 (as of February 2023). The Death Penalty Information Center website has a list of 60 botched executions since 1982, where the condemned did not die directly from the method of execution. So, leaving aside any question of the death penalty as a deterrent, it turns out that execution doesn’t even have a “100% success rate” at executing people.

Mr Anderson singled out for his death list the murderers of Lee Rigby. As heinous and despicable as that murder was, isn’t it telling that the first people that popped into his head were two black men rather than the white, far-right terrorist who murdered Jo Cox or the white police officer who murdered Sarah Everard? This is the politics of the dog whistle.

Is it surprising, though, considering the shocking statistics from America? The percentage of black men among prisoners on death row is vastly disproportionate to the percentage of black men among the US population, yet politicians rub their hands with glee at the prospect of executing even more. Mr Anderson appears to have few qualms about that happening in this country, if indeed he has considered the possibility at all.
Dr Hamid Khan
London

• Duncan Campbell is right to highlight the “moral and practical considerations” that led to the abolition of the death penalty in Britain. Not doing so could have resulted in even worse miscarriages of justice. To cite one example, Lord Denning, one of our most famous judges, commented on the Birmingham Six: “We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get them released if they’d been hanged. They’d have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied.”

Given the atmosphere at the time, he may well have been right about public opinion. How many more innocent people would have died, and would continue to die, if abolition had not happened?
Declan O’Neill
Oldham, Greater Manchester

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