Yesterday I came across a brief interview on the BBC website given by the film director Werner Herzog about his new film 'Into the Abyss'. I was very struck by this: he talked with both relatives of the victims and the two men who are accused of the triple murder. One, Michael Perry, was executed last year and the conversation that Herzog had with him took place just a week or so before this execution. Herzog spoke about this man with the BBC interviewer and described him as 'the more dangerous' though he didnt explain what he meant by this. I googled and found a long article on a puzzling website called 'deathrow-usa' by Perry claiming his innocence and abuse by the police after his arrest. It's quite convincing. Having read more widely however one is left fairly certain that he was at least partly responsible for what happened. But how can one be 100% sure? How can one be sure enough to kill him, however overriding the evidence might seem?

I then looked at photographs of the institution where prisoners are kept on Death Row: a bleak and jumbled mass of windowless buildings filled with bars, locks and numbers which reminded me of pictures I have seen of concentration camps.

It still strikes me that any country that can claim that there are some people who are better dead is saying something significant not just about those guilty of heinous crimes but about ALL its people. It puts the justice system on a pedestal that it can never live up to. 

Mistakes are made. The wrong people are sentenced. but a justice system which maintains the death penalty is denying this. Either that, or it is saying, yes maybe we make mistakes sometimes but hey who cares? 

This taints the entire society: it somehow puts the entire community under a cloud. Nothing is left quite untouched by it. Certainly none of its citizens. If ever I visited the USA (and I can say now with some certainty that I never will) as I passed through customs I would be thinking to myself: "this country kills its criminals" and everything would seem a little darker.