In The News - Aug/Sep

So it appears the the Sri Lankan President has announced that the death penalty will start being enforced again. This is a country that had the death penalty but refrained from using it since 1977. As the BBC put it so eloquently in french, it has been in abeyance! Oh la la.

Now due to a spate of violent crimes in a seemingly rapid decline into lawlessness, the support for reigniting capital punishment is growing. This is particularly interesting given the prominance of Budhism in Sri Lanka.

This came to my attention through a Sri Lankan publication I've never even heard of before called The Island. The opinion piece is quite astounding and as I read it I felt compelled to comment on it.

The piece starts with a quote from Oscar Wilde, and this is what really caught my eye.

"He has killed so he deserves to die."

Does Mr. Dunusinghe, the author, even realise the irony of using this quote to begin an article entitled "Bringing back the hangman". For those who aren't familiar, this is a quote taken directly from Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", which I have quoted in this blog in the past. Infact, the small stanza was one of the "Quotes of the day". If that doesn't raise some alarm bells, let me give you a little bit of history behind this Ballad. It was written by Wilde after he was imprisoned in Reading Gaol for committing the crime of "gross indecency" which was a lesser crime than "buggery". It was widely believed that he was either homosexual or bisexual. During his time in prison he felt the impact of an inmate being hanged for murder. Upon his release, while in exile, he wrote the ballad. The relatively long piece goes on in detail about the horrifying experience of a man condemned to die. The waiting, the certainty, the cold and calculated mechanism that is official murder. In two words, Albert Camus' "implacable ritual".

Other than the one I previously quoted, here is a section of it more directly related to the issue:

He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty place

He does not sit with silent men
Who watch him night and day;
Who watch him when he tries to weep,
And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.

He does not wake at dawn to see
Dread figures throng his room,
The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny black,
With the yellow face of Doom.

He does not rise in piteous haste
To put on convict-clothes,
While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows.

He does not know that sickening thirst
That sands one's throat, before
The hangman with his gardener's gloves
Slips through the padded door,
And binds one with three leathern thongs,
That the throat may thirst no more.

Quoting it in an article that is pro-death penalty would no doubt make him roll in his grave (see grave above). It's a beautiful piece of writing which is quite complex and relates heavily to Wilde's experience in prison.

Dostoevsky puts it:

"But the chief and worst pain may not be in the bodily suffering but in one's not knowing for certain that in an hour, and then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease to be a man and that that's bound to happen; the worst part of it is that it's certain ... To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute ..., but in the other case (execution) all that last hope which makes dying ten times as easy is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible."

This is quite poignant also given the topic of the article. What is the point of having a death sentence that is not in use? Since 1977 people have been sentenced to death, have had to suffer the uncertainty of their fate, only to be pardoned by the President.

It has been an issue I have discussed quite often, the effect of the death penalty on those who are left to languish in its clutches. It's not something I have dedicated an entire blog entry to, so I think that is on the agenda.

Back to the opinion piece at hand. If this fatal flaw at the very outset wasn't enough to completely discredit it, then reading on will leave you without any doubt.

By far the most worrying part of the article is the endorsement of capital punishment as the only alternative to police taking vigilante justice.

"Today we have a new and frightening development with the Police taking the law into their hands and arranging fake encounters for the purpose of carrying out executions. Should not these murderers also be tried and put to death after a judicial process? I ask the ‘pious’ what if we had captured Prabhakaran alive? Did he not deserve to die at the gallows? Saddam was hanged for less by the Americans and the West."

Prabhakaran was the leader of the Tamil Tigers who was found killed in a "rocket attack" in may this year. But there are reports that he was killed by a close range bullet to the back of the head, execution style. Calling on the death penalty to fix gaping holes in the justice system such as this does not seem like a particularly wise course of action. If your police and armed forces are unable to operate in a functioning and just manner, how can it be imagined that the death penalty will somehow alleviate this situation. If anything it would make the system far more brutal and arbitrary. God forbid a police force that deems it appropriate to execute accused criminals before bringing them to trial should be tasked with investigating the case against accused who are at risk of being sentenced to death.

The author suggests that despite the "corruption" of the authorities, a review by 3 Supreme Court judges could solve any issues of "wrongful execution". Sadly, and possibly unbeknownst to the scholar who penned this article, judges rarely if ever have the opportunity to go fact finding on appeal, and often are there solely to examine the evidence put before earlier courts, or any additional evidence found since then.

"It has been medically proved that hanging is more humane than any of the other methods. The term ‘Capital’ incidentally originates from Latin capitalis, literally "regarding the head" (Latin caput). Hence, a capital crime was originally one punished by the severing of the head."

Here is a textbook lesson in wikipedia journalism. You'll find these exact words, regarding the etymology of capital punishment, at the beginning of the wikipedia article on capital punishment. What worries me is the suggestion that hanging is medically proven to be more humane than any other form of execution. Find me one modern "medical" source that makes this ridiculous assertion and I'll hang myself.

It continues:

"We do not need to have any qualms about carrying out executions as Capital punishment has been practiced in virtually every society, and thus can be considered to be almost universal or close to it. Capital punishment is meted out in countries where more than 60% of the world’s population live. The four most populous countries in the world (the People’s Republic of China, India, United States and Indonesia) apply the death penalty and are unlikely to abolish it. Forty five countries today retain the death penalty."

I know my point of view might come across and patriarchal and colonial, but suggesting as any sort of authority that the death penalty is "in favour" around the world simply because it was once employed in every country, at least in their history, is not only absurd but totally missing the point. That the majority of nations (94) have completely abolished the death penalty is where the point can be found, and the direction in which modern sensibilities are moving. Of the other 45? Such hallowed company as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The U.S. being the only Western liberal legal system that employs, and that is only a minority of states within the states. The United States is by no means "united" on the capital punishment. Incidentally, according to the DPIC (Death Penalty Information Center) in 1977 only 16 countries were abolitionist. It's interest to note again that it was in 1977 that Sri Lanka held its last execution. Is this conicidence or the signs of a slow and steady progression towards abolition. So why now is Sri Lanka baulking against the international trend?

He then goes on to talk about the cost effective nature of the death penalty and the deterrant effect. The latter being a legitimate concern but wickedly difficult to establish either for or against. The former being one of the most discredited and disowned grounds for supporting the death penalty.

Perhaps my favourite section is this:

"Imprisonment is not for murderers. There are three purposes for prisons. Firstly, prison separates criminals from the general population. Second, prison is a form of punishment. Finally, prison is expected to rehabilitate prisoners; so that when prisoners are released from prison, these ex-convicts are less likely to repeat their crimes and risk another prison sentence. The logic for capital punishment is that prisons are for rehabilitating convicts who will eventually leave prison, and therefore prison is not for people who would never be released from prisons alive."

I hope that somebody doesn't come on here and tell me this is some marginal, ultra-conservative rag that nobody reads. Or that the opinion piece was written by an high school student and the editor desperately needed to fill a column. My fear is, after reading this article, this sort of misinformation could possibly be common.

Have I just wasted my time? Have I just given this article more air time and consideration than it deserves? Probably, but sometimes the ignorance of the many can be the firebrand of the few. Hmm, I quite fancy that phrase. (TM)

Quote of the day:

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime."

- Oscar Wilde