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Brussels - Septembre 2000
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Mrs Nicole FONTAINE, President of the European Parliament
Open letter to the people of the United States of America on the death penalty
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Within the European Parliament, which is the democratic voice of the 370 million Europeans who now make up the European Union, the vast majority of Members, irrespective of nationality and political persuasion, cannot understand how it is that the United States is now the only major democratic state in the world not to have renounced the use of the death penalty.
Every time an execution is about to take place in one of the states of your country, there are expressions of alarm and reprobation from all around the world. All appeals for clemency made by the highest religious and political leaders to the relevant governors, who have the final say, are systematically rejected.
The recent execution of Rocco Derek Barnabei has provoked particularly strong reactions in Europe both because there are once again doubts as to whether he is really guilty and because, while he is an American citizen, his family originally came from Italy, one of the European Union's Member States.
The diplomatic approaches which many of us have made to the Governor of Virginia at the request of the prisoner's friends and relatives and the organisations supporting his cause were made in vain. I am therefore taking the liberty of addressing this open letter to you, not in order to preach to you but simply to engage in an open and frank dialogue, in keeping with the bonds of friendship which exist between Europe and the United States.
On this side of the Atlantic, no-one disputes the fact that your great country is widely seen around the world as a symbol of freedom and democracy. None of us have forgotten all that Europe owes your country, which helped it to regain its freedom, shedding the blood of its sons and daughters in the process, during the two world wars. No-one disputes the fact that the death penalty has been recognised by the US Supreme Court as constitutional. Nor does anyone dispute the fact that people who are sentenced to death then have many long years in which to seek to have their trial reviewed. No-one disputes the right of any organised society to protect itself against criminals who threaten the safety of individuals and their property, nor the right to inflict a punishment on those criminals that is proportionate to the crimes committed.
Europe has not forgotten that, until recently, it applied the death penalty itself, often very cruelly. Certain countries abolished it many years ago by repealing the relevant criminal law provisions or by deciding no longer to apply them. Other leading European nations, such as my own of France, though deeply attached to universal values of human rights, had not yet abolished this sentence as recently as two decades ago. And when their parliaments eventually took the step of abolishing it, the political debate was every bit as heated as it is at present in the United States. Now, however, the debate is over.
A shared understanding has spread throughout Europe, removing any remaining doubts. This new awareness, which I now call upon the American people to embrace, is based on the following considerations: no objective research has ever shown that the death penalty has acted as a deterrent against serious crime and in none of the European countries that have abolished the death penalty in recent years has such crime increased; modern societies have sufficient means of protecting themselves other than by violating the principle that human life is sacred; punishment by the death penalty is a relic of the old law of 'an eye for an eye': you have killed, therefore you too must die; an execution looks more like a macabre sacrificial rite - a legal murder - than a dignified process; whenever a stable society based on the rule of law, which has other means of defending itself, nevertheless applies the death penalty, it undermines the sacred nature of all human life and its own moral authority to defend that principle in whichever part of the world it may come under threat; finally, too many of those who have been executed have subsequently been found to be innocent and in those cases it is society itself, by the very laws that it has established, which has committed an irretrievable crime.
Just one example of a single innocent person being sent to his death unnecessarily, through a miscarriage of justice, would be sufficient to condemn the very principle of capital punblishment itself. And yet we all know that such errors have occurred, particularly in the United States.
I am aware that the majority of people in your country still favour maintaining the death penalty and that, in any democracy, the people are sovereign. However, is this argument enough to still the consciences of those who have responsibility for leading their country wisely, with due regard for contemporary values? When President Lincoln abolished slavery, did he enjoy the support of a majority of the southern states? When President Roosevelt committed the United States to fighting alongside the people of Europe to restore peace and freedom in a world devastated by the Nazis and their allies, did he from the outset have the support of a majority of Americans? When President Kennedy fought to end the racial segregation that was still in place in certain states, did he not have to show the courage, probably at the risk of his own life, to go against the wishes of a large number of people who were determined to maintain the existing system even by violent means? Do today's politicians, for opportunistic or electoral reasons, really wish to appear a pale shadow of those great visionaries who forged the unity of the American nation and set it on the path to greatness?
I express the hope, not as a critic but as a friend of one of the world's leading nations, that the United States will join Europe in banning the death penalty, an anachronistic punishment which we should leave behind as we move forward into the new millennium.
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