Leading Article:4,000 miles from Georgia

At midnight last night you may have been asleep, or watching the football on television, or perhaps you looked in on the children as they slept. At midnight last night, Nicholas Ingram was due to have died at the hands of the State of Georgia. Ingram's fate, delayed by 24 hours at the last minute, has reopened the debate about capital punishment.

We oppose the death penalty. This stand is not taken because of the question of deterrence, although there is no evidence that the death penalty deters crime (so much so that proponents of state execution have abandoned it as an argument). The fact that the execution process can be hugely expensive, costing far more than life imprisonment, should not weigh heavily as a factor, either. Nor should the illusion of painless death, peddled by the modern heirs to Dr Guillotin.

Edward Heath once argued that the true test of a commitment to capital punishment was not a willingness to act as the executioner, but a preparedness to be executed by mistake. Yet the truth that where there is capital punishment innocent people are bound to die is not central to our argument. Nor is the ghastly arbitrariness of deciding which convicted sinners suffer death and which do not, as enacted in the American legal system.

Even if the death penalty was a deterrent; even if mistakes were never made; even if the system was fair and faultless; even if you could switch off murderers like turning off a light: we would still oppose the killing of prisoners by the state.

Our argument is situated firmly in the territory of society, its values and ethics. The important thing about the death penalty is not whether it is nice, nasty, fair or unjust for the criminal, but what it says about the rest of us. Are we made greater or lesser by it?

This newspaper believes we are made lesser; that the act of judicial execution demeans the society that undertakes it. Compassion for ourselves, not the murderer, should dictate a loathing for the paraphernalia of death. We are the ones contaminated by the employment of executioners, the debate about the technology of killing, the god-like deliberation about how it will happen and when.

The death penalty corrupts us, lowering the threshold of our revulsion to the taking of life. A murder plus an execution makes two lives taken, not one death negated. It is hard to accept the contention that being prepared to execute those responsible for murder demonstrates our special concern for life itself. Consider the employment in Georgia of "volunteer executioners". Are these simply public-spirited citizens, who could not get on the school governors' list or who have just finished an unpaid shift at the local hospice? Or are they more likely to be voyeurs, members of the ghoulish tendency.

The death lobby, here and in the US, says a society with the death penalty somehow sanctifies life. We say that such a society cheapens it. They believe there is something noble in being prepared to execute murderers; we believe there is something nauseating about it.

Worse, there is something hopeless, too. Judicial killing is the ultimate act of pessimism, negating even the smallest possibility of reform, repentance or forgiveness. It reduces all of those involved to the level of the pathetic, amoral wretch who was facing death last night in Jackson.