Are The Sun opening a dangerous box?
Are The Sun Opening a dangerous box?
It's one the the most emotive questions of all, how would you react if someone you loved or cared for was murdered? The reality is of course, you don't know, and hopefully you never will as that would mean it has happened to you. I would guess the reaction would be absed on emotion rather than logic, and human beings should surely be no other way, but it is no way to run a justice system.
Murderers it would seem, are not hard to find in the news these days. From the recent conviction of Steve Wright for the Soham murders, to todays conviction of Levi Bellfield. The question of how to repsond to murder, personally and in terms of law is right at the front of the agenda. The mother of Sally Ann Bowman was clear in her response, she wanted the murderer dead. It's impossible not to sympathise with her position, but is a life for a life really the way forward?
The Sun used this call to 'open the debate' on the reintroduction of capital punishment. Despite the paper making clear it's instinct was not to bring the death penalty back, they wanted a big debate on the issue, the reasons are perfectly noble of course, my guess is they expected the poll they ran to produce an 80-20 split in favour of the reintroduction, in line with previous polls. The debate would create an element of mischief, becuase even the possiblilty of bringing it back would be a clear breach of EU law, and by debating this the paper, while not supporting reintroduction, is clearly stating that we refuse to rule something out just because the EU says so. It's nice bit of EU bashing nicely thrown into the mix by default as a result.
They probably assumed there was a reasonable minority against reintroduction, and they could then say they understood the calls for the death penalty to be brought back, but we can't run a justice system on that emotional response, and the fact a sizeable minority agreed justified themselves going against the majoirty.
However they got a major shock today. The poll was not 80-20 in favour, not even 90-10, but 99-1. That's 99% in favour, and 1% against. True it is only a poll of it's readers, but is it really sustainable for the nations biggest selling paper to hold it's position whilst 99% of it's own readership disagree? What is more there were more than 95,000 votes cast, so it can hardly be dismissed as a small, self selecting sample as most Sun polls can.
It will be facinating to see how the Sun can hold it's position, if indeed it can. Our system is certainly not so perfect that there are no miscarriages of justice, to take the chance of killing one innocent man is surely a dangerous route to go down. This 'debate' however is not as clear cut is the editors of The Sun probably first thought, and if our biggest selling newspaper, the one every politician courts assiduously come election time, switches sides on this issue, the consequences for Britian could be great, in my view for the worse. Whichever side you are on, I advise to keep watching, the outcome could have big ramifications for the mindset of the British attitude to our justice system for a long time to come.
