Barack Obama told a press conference on Wednesday that he disagreed with the Supreme Court decision outlawing the execution of child rapists.Obama, whose position on the death penalty has changed over the years (his staff prefers the verb ‘evolved’), said that child rape qualifies as “heinous” and therefore as subject to the death penalty.“I disagree with the decision. I have said repeatedly that I think the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstance for the most egregious of crimes. I think that the rape of a small child, six or eight years old, is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision under narrow limited well defined circumstance the death penalty is at least potentially applicable,” he said.In 1996, Obama went on the record opposing the death penalty and he wrote in his most recent memoir, The Audacity of Hope, that the penalty “does little to deter crime”. By the time he ran for the US Senate in 2004, he had come out in favour of the death penalty, saying that society has the right to express its outrage at heinous crimes.He said the system of death penalty justice was so flawed that the nation should declare a moratorium on executions, such as that imposed in Illinois by Republican Governor George Ryan.He faced questions as well about his decision to opt out of public financing of his campaign, bridling at the suggestion that this constituted a flip-flop. “The characterisation of a flip-flop was wrong,” he said, noting that the Republicans, in recent election campaigns and in this one, place no restrictions on how the party raises and spends money”.He also touched on foreign affairs, offering an unstinting condemnation of Robert Mugabe’s stifling of dissent and overturning an election process in Zimbabwe. “What remains of this election is a complete and total sham,” he said, adding that African leaders—particularly the South Africans—have been remiss in failing to challenge him.
