The War on Crime, Hurrah

"Our deepest national conviction is that every life is precious, because every life is the gift of a creator who intended us to live in liberty and equality."
George W Bush, 11 September 2002

That bastion of civilisation, that liberator of the oppressed, that scourge of injustice, that enforcer of law, that glowing God-favoured paragon of justice tempered with mercy, the United States, today set another fine example for the rest of us by terminally renditionising its thousandth bad guy since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The USA temporarily abandoned the death penalty for ten years before that, perhaps because it had a use for murderers in Vietnam and needed jail space for refuseniks.

The object of this millennial exercise in correction was one Kenneth Lee Boyd, who killed his estranged wife and her father seventeen years ago and was sentenced in 1994. I am sure we are all well rid of him. Thirty-eight of the fifty states permit the death penalty; and China, Iran and Vietnam executed even more people than the US last year, so presumably nothing about the business was either cruel or unusual. This is what makes the death penalty such an effective deterrent.

Meanwhile, a former Crown Colony has been warned by one of the Great Liberator's henchmen, John Howard, that executing Australian drug traffickers "will have an effect on the relationship [between Australia and Singapore] on a people-to-people, population-to-population basis". It will not, of course, have any effect on arms dealing or other money-making activities.