Thou
Shall Not Kill…A Rejoinder to Dr. Aliyu Tilde
By
Hannatu Musa
FORWARDED
BY DR. ALIYU TILDE
tildealiyu@afrione.com
I
was interested to read the recent public debate in favour of death
penalty. It prompted me to ask friends and neighbours their opinions on
the matter. Just about
everybody I talked to was strongly in favour of capital punishment,
citing a multitude of reasons why Nigeria needs to retain death as a
reasonable form of punishment. Fortunately, there also seems to be a
consensus that this punishment has to be reserved for the worst of
crimes – most people refer to murder as the crime that befits death.
However, none of the arguments I heard persuaded me that capital
punishment is a just or effective solution even to murder.
I will take this opportunity to justify my position, (although
this puts me in a lonely corner).
We
have all heard the arguments in favour of the death penalty.
The advocates of capital punishment claim that it is a necessary
deterrent against the worst crimes, such as murder in cold blood.
It is argued that any lesser penalty, such as life-time
imprisonment, will be interpreted by many as ‘the culprit got away
with it’. Others would be
tempted to follow the murderers’ example leading to an increased
murder rate. By taking
somebody’s life in a premeditated way, it is claimed, the killers
forsakes any right to live – after all, they didn’t extend that kind
of compassion to their victims. It
is automatically assumed that somebody who has killed has no wish to be
reformed in any way and that murderers are therefore beyond salvation.
Sympathies
for a murderer’s right to live are interpreted in two ways.
Either they are seen as the effect of an exaggerated valuing of
human life by people who do not believe in an afterlife (if life on
earth is all we have we must take the greatest care to preserve it), or
any empathy that is shown for a murderer is construed as the attitude of
somebody who has lesser morals and ethical values because they do not
value a life enough to rid society of evil killers.
However,
it is debatable whether capital punishment has ever acted as a
deterrent. It is true that many countries with high rates of violent
crimes exercise the death penalty.
The United States is a classic example.
In 1995, the country had a national murder rate of 8 per 100,000
population (a high number in the Western world).
A total of 38 of the 50 US States provide for the death penalty
in law and in total 56 people were executed that year.
The United States is also one of the strongest supporters of
capital punishment with 70% of the population supporting execution for
murder.
Nonetheless,
it is futile to use murder rates as a measure of the effectiveness that
capital punishment has as a deterrent because these statistics say
nothing about the number of killings that might or might not have taken
place had capital punishment been replaced by life-imprisonment.
To measure the effectiveness of capital punishment as a
deterrent, it is preferable to examine murder rates of societies after
they decided to abolish the death sentence. Canada, for example,
abolished the death penalty in 1976.
In the year previous to the abolition, the homicide rate was 3.09
per 100,000 population. By
1980, this rate had fallen to 2.41 and since then it has declined
further to 1.78 in 2001. This
denotes a 42% decline in the homicide rate since the abolition of the
death penalty.
We
can therefore assume that the threat of death does not deter murderers
from their actions. Neither
was the abolition of the death penalty interpreted as a licence to
murder by others. In the face of these statistics, it is not surprising
that the most recent survey of research findings on the relation between
the death penalty and homicide rates, conducted for the United Nations
in 1988 and updated in 2002, concluded that there is no convincing
evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than other
punishments. (R. Hood, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective,
Oxford University Press, third edition, 2002).
In
fact, the implementation of the death penalty can cost the lives of
innocent people who are wrongly convicted.
Since 1973, 107 prisoners have been released from death row in
the USA after evidence of their innocence emerged. Some had come close
to execution after spending many years under sentence of death. In the
case of other prisoners who were executed, new evidence proving
innocence came too late. Recurring features in their cases include
prosecutorial or police misconduct, the use of unreliable witness
testimony, physical evidence or confessions, and inadequate defence
representation. While it is possible that the legal system of the USA is
flawed, these kinds of weaknesses would exist even within the best
judicial system in the world.
After all, judicial systems are designed and implemented by
humans, and to err is human.
Worse
still, punishments can be applied randomly and discriminatorily.
In the USA, 43% of all inmates on death row are black, while they
represent only an average 12% of the population. It is probably no coincidence that, there, 99% of all lawyers
are white, and 70% of the accused belong to an ethnic minority.
The death penalty in the USA is imposed disproportionately upon
those whose victims are white, offenders who are people of colour, and
on those who are poor and uneducated. I do not wish to single out the US as having a rotten
judicial system. All
judicial systems are designed and implemented by humans who, like all of
us, have inherent values and beliefs that affect their judgements and
decision-making.
In
view of the fact that judicial systems can be mistaken or biased, it is
important that individuals are never deprived of the opportunity to
prove their innocence. This
does not mean that murderers should be left to walk free, rather that it
is better to have the option of releasing those who are falsely
convicted from a prison sentence. This is especially true in a country
with little political stability or where people do not have confidence
in the justice system.
If
capital punishment statistically does not prove to be a deterrent
against murder and mistaken convictions cannot be revoked, then why do
so many countries still retain the death penalty?
Maybe
it is inconsequential to argue that capital punishment is an effective
deterrent for potential murderers.
For many of its supporters, the motivation for killing a murderer
is not to protect society from evil, but to act as a form of
retribution. It is believed
to be the only punishment fit for the worst of crimes.
Advocates argue that a murder victim’s life is trivialised if a
likewise punishment is not inflicted on the killer.
At this point, the debate here really is not about the
hypothetical value attached to a person’s life, but about the purpose
of the judicial system.
We
need to ask what we ultimately want from the system.
The law sets out the rules that allow us to live in harmony and
the judicial system is there to enforce the law and allow society to
exist peacefully. If we
want a judicial system to act as a mechanism of ensuring that society
abides by the law, then imprisonment is an effective tool to protect us
from dangerous criminals. On
the other hand, maybe we want a judicial system that does not take into
account the well-being of society as a whole; rather, its function is to
appease victims on an individual basis.
In that case, many victims or their relatives will want to see a
perpetrator suffer even when nothing is gained by revenge. However, in
this case, the judicial system is a framework that keeps peace by
carrying out revenge on the victim’s behalf and prevents a spiral of
revenge and blood feuds.
In
summary, capital punishment has been proven to be an ineffective
deterrent against crime. Many
countries around the world have either stopped using the death sentence
or abolished capital punishment, and their number is increasing
annually. There was no rise
in the rate of murders or violent crimes as a result.
Neither do evil people walk away from their crimes unpunished in
these countries. A life
sentence is still an effective deterrent and a sentence that may be
passed more frequently, thereby allowing a penal system to be tougher on
crime. There is also
the question of innocent lives that have been lost because of errors or
prejudiced judicial systems.
If
it is proven that societies can protect themselves from murderers by
imposing prison sentences, the death penalty serves no other purpose but
to bring meaning to the victim’s life by signifying that a killer’s
life is worth no more than that of the victim.
It may help us come to terms with acts of evil when we see a
closure on killers conduct and their lives. But it will never bring back
a deceased person, nor will it justify the institutionalised killing
that capital punishment represents.
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