Don't turn Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and their murderous ilk into martyrs. That's the plea from Montreal, where people from around the world have gathered to mark Oct. 10, world day against the death penalty.

Celebrities such as human rights activist Bianca Jagger and movie star Catherine Deneuve are making common cause with former Irish president Mary Robinson to appeal to the world's better angels, and against the executioner.

Even for terrorists and despots.

"The execution of a condemned man is barbaric," Jagger told the Second World Congress Against the Death Penalty, which met in Montreal this past week. "The execution of an innocent man is murder."

Yet the drive to abolish the death penalty is in danger of faltering, in a world made crueller by 9/11 and its violent aftermath.

Death by legal decree is a growth industry. Last year 1,146 people are known to have been executed, most of them in China, Iran, the United States and Vietnam, Amnesty International reports. But even more — 2,756 — were condemned to die. Death row is getting crowded.

While Canada and 117 other countries have completely abolished the death penalty, or don't use it, 66 continue to hang or shock criminals, stone them, gas them, behead them, shoot them or poison them.

Worse yet, important, democratic countries like India, Indonesia and the Philippines have started imposing the death penalty again, or threaten to, after a long moratorium. One of "liberated" Iraq's first independent decisions was to restore capital punishment.

Yet "the death penalty is the ultimate irreversible denial of human rights," says Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary-general.

What could be more chilling than the controversial case of Paul House, an American convicted of murdering a neighbour, on the basis of much-disputed evidence. Considering his appeal this past week, a 15-judge panel split almost evenly.

Eight said he should be executed. Six declared he was innocent. One said he should be retried. If ever there were a case of "reasonable doubt," this is it.

Even so, he will be executed, barring a Supreme Court intervention.

Canada abolished the death penalty completely in 1998, as unworthy of a compassionate society, after retiring it for most crimes back in 1976. Murderers here get life, with no parole for 25 years. Since 1976, our murder rate has dropped sharply.

In a powerful, unanimous ruling in 2001, the Supreme Court found "there is no convincing argument that exposure ... to death in prison by execution advances Canada's public interest in a way that the alternative, eventual death in prison by natural causes, would not."

There is toughness in those words, and rightly so. Few can pity a murderer. But there is humanity, too. The death penalty brutalizes societies that resort to it. It should be consigned to the history books.

©2004 Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

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