Bush 'must scrap death penalty'

2003-01-12 23:21

Dominic Evans

London - Activists around the world on Sunday applauded the move by the governor of Illinois to spare death row prisoners from execution and urged President George W Bush to follow his lead by abolishing the death penalty.

Governor George Ryan on Saturday commuted the death sentences on more than 150 men and women to a maximum of life in prison without parole, declaring the execution system to be "broken".

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International, which opposes all use of the death penalty, said Ryan's announcement offered his fellow Republican Bush a golden opportunity.

"This is a chance for President Bush to bring the United States in line with the world trend against the death penalty," Amnesty spokesman Kamal Samari told Reuters.

"He could take a moral stand and signal that the death penalty is not the deterrent to criminals it is presented as."

Bush's home state of Texas has come under particular scrutiny for its frequent use of the death penalty. About 150 people were put to death during the six years Bush was Texas governor before he became president. He has defended the system.

Ryan, a former staunch supporter of capital punishment who says he gradually turned against the death penalty, lifted the death sentences just two days before he was due to leave office.

He acted following a review ordered nearly three years ago after investigations found 13 death-row prisoners were innocent.

Samari said Ryan's decision marked a "significant step in the struggle against the death penalty" and urged governors in US states still implementing execution to follow suit.

Illinois is one of 38 states with death penalty laws. The US federal government also has the death penalty.

Amnesty marked world Human Rights Day last month by drawing attention to the 600 people it said had been put to death in the United States in the last decade.

Among those executed last year were a mentally ill man, convicts who had been deprived of legal rights and three under 18's at the time of their crimes - the only three child offenders known to have been judicially executed anywhere in 2002, Amnesty said.

"It is an irony that the world's superpower is not taking a lead on moral issues," Samari said.

Amnesty's comments were echoed across Europe and Africa.

"Vengeance" not justice

The Council of Europe, the region's top human rights watchdog, hailed Ryan's courage and conviction and said the death penalty had "no place in a civilised society".

"I sincerely hope that this is a step toward the abolition of the death penalty in the whole of the United States," council Secretary General Walter Schwimmer said in a statement.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who had written to Ryan appealing for mercy to be shown to condemned inmates, welcomed the Illinois governor's decision.

"This is fantastic news," said a spokesperson for Tutu's office in South Africa. "His feeling would be that the death penalty is vengeance, it's not justice."

In Kenya, sociology professor Katama Mkangi who was imprisoned without trial in the 1980s for human rights work, described the commuting of the sentences as "a breath of fresh air in a rotten system."

"His decision is a wake-up call for the United States justice system to catch up with the rest of civilisation."

The United States and Japan are the only industrialised democracies in which the death penalty is still used.

While opinion polls indicate most Americans still favour capital punishment, support has been eroding and the country's largest lawyers' organization, the American Bar Association, has called for a national moratorium.

But even if Bush were to support a national halt to executions, it would not necessarily impact the states. Each governor has jurisdiction over laws regarding state death penalty cases.

In Maryland, for example, the newly elected Republican governor has said he will lift a moratorium on the death penalty imposed by the former Democratic governor.

From 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated, until the end of 2002 there have been 820 US executions, 71 of them last year. There are nearly 3nbsp;700 men and women under death sentence in the United States currently.

- Reuters