To add to what APB said, we have far, far more experience of terrorist bombings in the UK than you have in the mainland USA. Most recently, a bomb went off at the BBC headquarters in London a few weeks ago, and two bombs have gone off at my local postal sorting office in North London in the last couple of months. There hasn’t been one in which the death count has been as high as in Oklahoma City – partly, no doubt, because we have much tighter security surrounding government buildings – but the case of the Birmingham pub bombs in 1974 make an instructive comparison.
Bombs went off in two city centre pubs in Birmingham, on the same evening in November 1974, killing 21 people and injuring about 200. There was a third bomb outside a bank which failed to go off. Six men were arrested for the bombing the following day, while they were on the way to Belfast to attend the funeral of an IRA terrorist who had blown himself up with his own bomb. They all signed confessions. Several of them tested positive for handling explosives. The judge who sentenced them described the case against them – a combination of confessions, forensic and circumstantial evidence – as the most overwhelming he had ever seen in a murder trial and the men, who had each received 21 life sentences, were refused leave to appeal.
Although many people had doubts about the convictions from the outset, it was not until 1991 that it was determined conclusively that they were unsafe. The evidence that the confessions were tortured from the suspects, which had been supressed at the trial, was finally accepted by the Court of Appeal. The “explosive residue” on their hands turned out to be the plastic coating from a pack of playing cards.
Although their experiences have had a devastating long-term effect which can never be reversed, they were released, and paid sompensation for their wrongful convictions.
So when you complain about non Americans bitching and moaning about the death penalty, consider this: if we had not had the wisdom to abolish it in the UK we would have executed six innocent men for that offence, as well as a few dozen others with unsafe convictions for terrorist and non-terrorist offences over the past few decades. Of course, once they had been executed, the pressure to clear their names would have been reduced, leaving the majority of people content in the knowledge that there had been no miscarriage of justice.
And how often, pray tell, has Iceland been blown up, with such a derisory penalty for murder? Surely the murder rate must be way higher than that of the USA, with its robust approach to criminal sentencing?
