The empty, self-defeating and pointless sentencing of Pavlo Lapshyn
Peter Saunders, 27 October 2013
A 25 year-old Lithuanian immigrant and self-confessed white supremacist was this week found guilty of the murder of an 82 year-old Muslim man, and of detonating three bombs near mosques in the West Midlands. The Crown Prosecutor wanted a Whole Life sentence, but the Judge resisted this and ordered that Pavlo Lapshyn spent the next 40 years in prison.
Forty years! It may not be a whole life span, but it’s still an awfully long time. Forty years ago, in 1973, I started my first job, my second child was born, and I bought my first house. Since then I have raised two children, had two careers, bought and sold five houses, saved for a decent pension, travelled around the world, lived abroad, got divorced, had several love affairs, got re-married, drank many pints in pubs, eaten many meals in restaurants, and been blessed with three grandchildren and a dog. None of this will be possible for Lapshyn.
Assuming he serves his full sentence, he will come out of prison in 2053, by which time he will have become hopelessly institutionalised. He will have no source of income, no career, nowhere to live, no friends, no family, no achievements and no memories. He will almost certainly have to be looked after by the state for what remains of his wretched life, and if he still poses a risk to the public, he will need to be kept under close surveillance too. His crime was appalling, but his punishment seems empty, self-defeating and pointless.
Pointless not just for him, but for us too. The UK Ministry of Justice says it costs almost £40,000 per year to keep someone in prison. Lapshyn’s punishment will therefore cost UK taxpayers £1.6 million at today’s prices. And then we’ll have to house, feed and look after him when he comes out. Is there no better alternative?
Capital punishment is the obvious alternative, and there are strong arguments in its favour. The great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, argued that the function of punishment is to heal the wounds done to collective moral sentiments by transgressors. The greater the violation of shared norms, the harsher the punishment has to be. Societies execute murderers, not for vengeance, nor for deterrence, but because shared, sacred values have been violated and can only be restored by proportionate punishment.
Many people seem to agree with this. Almost fifty years after the UK Parliament suspended and later abolished capital punishment, 74 per cent of British voters still favour it as a penalty for at least some types of murder. Some killings are just so appalling that nothing less than execution seems adequate as a response. Anything less feels like an insult to the victims and a slap in the face to the rest of us.
But there are two powerful objections to executing convicted murderers. One is that occasionally, we make a mistake and kill an innocent person who has been wrongly convicted. The memory of Timothy Evans, wrongly hanged in 1950 on a charge of killing his wife and infant daughter, still haunts us.
The other is that judicial execution is a grizzly business which no longer feels appropriate in a humane, liberal society. Whether we tell the state-appointed executioner to hang, electrocute, poison, shoot or decapitate prisoners, modern sensibilities are likely to feel defiled by such an act carried out in our name.
The ancient Greeks had a more civilised solution. As we know from the story of Socrates, they brought the condemned prisoner a cup of hemlock and left him (or her) to drink it. Nowadays, of course, we have pills and potions that will terminate a life more swiftly and less gruesomely than hemlock. These could be made available, on request, to any convicted murderer serving a life sentence.
Under this proposal, there would be no requirement for murderers serving life sentences to end their own lives, and no pressure would be exerted on them to do so. But those who preferred this option to the prospect of endless years behind bars would be given the means to exercise it.
Such ‘enabled suicide’ would be a lot less grizzly than capital punishment, with no need for hangmen, firing squads or doctors with needles. It would also avoid the risk of executing an innocent person. No prisoner would be required to take a pill, so those fighting to prove their innocence could still do so, just as they do now.
Pavlo Lapshyn is to be kept alive at huge public expense so he can spend endless days in a confined space with no point to his existence. The grief of his victim’s family is not assuaged by this; other racist hot-heads will not be deterred by it; Lapshyn himself will not become a better human being for the experience of 40 years inside; and the rest of us will have to pick up the tab for decades to come. It would be better for everybody if killers serving long sentences were given the option in prison to terminate their wretched lives early and humanely.