Capital punishment in Texas
– appeal by Nicole Fontaine to spare the lives of Betty Lou Beets and Odell Barnes

Mrs Nicole Fontaine, President of the European Parliament, has made the following declaration:

‘The execution due to take place tonight in a Texas prison of a 63-year-old woman,  Betty Lou  Beets, despite her moving appeals for clemency more than 20 years after the events concerned, and the execution of Odell Barnes scheduled for 1 March, also in Texas, despite the grave doubts surrounding his actual guilt, can only create a profound sense of unease in the conscience of Europeans and the world at large.

‘Europe is aware that, in former times, its own systems of civil and even religious justice practised and accepted the death penalty, which was seen as a punishment, a protection and a deterrent.

‘Yet for several decades now all the countries of the European Union have totally outlawed the use of capital punishment. It is barbaric. It is widely accepted that it has no deterrent effect on criminals, because it has sent to their deaths too many victims later found to be innocent.

‘On the eve of the third millennium, it has become archaic and morally unacceptable that large civilised nations such as the United States, which enjoy considerable influence in the world, should not yet have realised that the time has come for them too to end this barbaric practice.

The stature of the United States would grow in the eyes of the world if it were to take this moral step, which all the Member States of the Union have already taken and which none now regrets, while at the same time ending the spectacle of the thousands of condemned prisoners awaiting their fate on death row, sometimes for ten or twenty years, especially when the final decision may rest solely on electoral calculations.’

For further information contact: E. BASSOT, tel. 00 32 75 35 19 43