It is easier to care about a person facing execution if we can first persuade ourselves that they are innocent. The difficulty begins when we cannot. Then we have to decide whether our concern extends to someone whose actions we may find abhorrent, and whether asking how they have been treated somehow diminishes the person they harmed.
That difficulty deserves more attention than a comfortable declaration that every life matters. It tests what such a declaration actually commits us to.
A reported notice from the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty concerns an external evaluation of its 2024–2027 project, “Leaving No One on Death Row Behind”, which focuses on gender discrimination within the struggle against capital punishment. The supplied reporting does not establish the evaluation’s findings. Its stated focus does, however, invite a serious consideration: how much can a general commitment to fairness overlook when it fails to examine people’s particular circumstances?
Treating everyone alike sounds fair. Sometimes it is. But the same procedure can bear differently on people whose circumstances differ. Examining whether gender discrimination has affected someone’s treatment requires evidence, rather than an assumption that it must have done. Equally, refusing to examine it because the rules appear neutral settles the matter before the inquiry begins.
There is an understandable objection here. Why devote attention to the circumstances of someone convicted of terrible harm when victims and their families also need to be heard? Attention is finite. Public sympathy can be painfully selective.
Yet examining the treatment of an accused or convicted person need not require a favourable judgement of their character. If safeguards depend on sympathy, they become least reliable precisely where public feeling is strongest.
This has a less dramatic counterpart in ordinary life. In a family dispute, a workplace grievance or an argument with someone we dislike, we can become remarkably incurious once we have decided who the difficult person is. Their account starts to sound like an excuse before they have finished giving it.
The consequences are nowhere near equivalent. The habit is still worth noticing. We cannot reasonably ask institutions to examine uncomfortable evidence while allowing ourselves to stop listening whenever the person speaking has lost our goodwill.