daz said:
When sentencing a fellow human being to death in a democratic society though, surely it's the right thing to go through the due process before any such punishment is handed out?
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
The question is, what is a fair due process?
Have you looked at the nature of a lot of the appeals that keep prisoners in the US on death row for years, even decades? I have, in the past. A very large percentage of them are purely procedural, and
designed simply to delay. That is, it isn't just that that was the outcome. Long times on death row aren't accidental. It is entirely as a result of design.
The are a number of lawyers that disagree with the DP for principled, or religious, reasons, and do everything they can to
delay (not even to prevent) execution, whether there are actual grounds or not. They are determined to frustrate the objectives of the system, regardless of what crime was committed, and whether or not guilt is clear, even admitted.
They are, of course, fully entitled to use any legal recourse open to them. I can't blame them for using any and every method in following their principles, even if some are pure technicality. But what I can object to is a system that allows such exploitation.
I'll give you a case in point. The US rules on using evidence after search are very different to the UK. In the UK, valid evidence is likely to be admissible, subject to it's probabtive and prejudicial value, even if the method by which it was found was illegal. In the US, that will be "fruit of the poisoned tree" and disallowed. So, suppose some young policemen forgets to give the precise warning necessary before searching a car, or even mixes up exactly what parts of a car you can and can't search in given circumstances (and even that is pretty complex). He then finds a gun that was used as a murder weapon. The jury will never hear about the gun (unless it can be brought in some other way) if the search was ruled illegal.
But .... was the gun found? Yup. Did it have the accused's fingerprints on it? Yup. Was he driving away from the scene? Yup. Had it been fired recently? Yup. Is it a ballistics match? Yup. Will the jury know any of that? Nope.
Is the accused guilty as sin? Yup.
But none the less, an astute lawyer can suppress evidence because of that rule. In fact, you don't need to be particulary astute. But that is simply the more overt of a VAST range of procedural issues that cause complications, and appeals.
Bear in mind, large numbers of DP appeals aren't going to win. The attorneys filing them know full well that they won't win, and in many cases, will openly and publicly admit that. So why file them? Because it is a delaying action, and because they feel the DP is wrong in principle.
This is what I mean about not aping the US system, and therefore not incurring it's costs.
What would the UK system cost? I don't know, because we don't know what the law, or procedures, would be. What I do know is that for all the complexity of evidence rules in the UK, they are nowhere near the farcical state of the US ones.
And that's why I say the cost argument is moot. We just don't know what the cost would be, because it entirely depends on the nature, and minutiae of detail, in the system.
Due process? Yes, definitely.
US system? Not if the UK has any sense, no.
