Death Penalty is Inhuman! It Denies us the Opportunity to Forgive
- Category: Governance
- Date 21-08-2005
- 1194 views
A woman was nearly killed by her master. In self-defence, she wrested a gun from him and shot him dead instead. Very soon, she was charged with murder, tried, sentenced to death and executed immediately.
Her family and descendants later took up the matter, arguing that she deserved to be pardoned. It has now been realised that the punishment she got was disproportionately harsh; therefore, she has been forgiven posthumously, sixty years after her death.
In case this is news to you, the media has reported an incident in 1945 about the only woman ever executed in Georgia’s electric chair. She was a black woman named Lena Baker, who was sentenced to die after appearing before a marathon one-day trial by an all-white, all-male jury.
During her brief trial, she had testified that a man, E. B. Knight, whom she had been hired to care for, had held her against her will in a gristmill and threatened to shoot her if she tried to leave. She then grabbed Knight’s gun and shot him when he raised a metal bar to strike her.
Now, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has decided to absolve Lena Baker, noting that she was not innocent, but the decision to deny her clemency in 1945 “was a grievous error”.
The Georgia-based prison-advocacy group, Prison and Jail Project, assisted Baker’s descendants with the pardon request; whereupon the project director John Cole Vodicka described Baker’s murder as a “blatant instance of injustice … a legal lynching”.
It is unreasonable to punish a criminal by killing him, as it is strange to forgive a dead person after killing him. In Baker’s case, after the Board’s decision, her grandnephew, who led the family’s effort to clear her name, consoled thus, “I believe she’s somewhere around God’s throne and can look down and smile.”
Nevertheless, this scenario brings to light the folly and danger of terminating human life presumably in the administration of justice. The existence of capital punishment on a country’s statute books is a bad mark on the society’s perception of justice and disfigures its reputation before man, God, or both.
Only a month ago, Tanzanian politicians, human rights activists, and prominent lawyers called on government to erase the death sentence from the country’s law books and substitute it with life imprisonment. Unfortunately, not all of them were unanimous that capital punishment is basically bad and inhuman.
Many argued that it is no longer worth the paper it is written on because “not a single death sentence has been effected, … no president has endorsed any, … and convicts never get hanged”. (‘Lawyers: Repeal death penalty’ Sunday Citizen 24th July 2005).
One finds the arguments advanced by most commentators quite disagreeable as the major reason they are denouncing capital punishment in Tanzania is because it has not been implemented in reality. It has remained on paper, so it is discouraged apparently for the reason that it has swelled-up the pages of the law-books, therefore retaining it is a waste of paper space.
In addition, the big number of convicts who have not been hanged is causing congestion in prisons. Thus, they argue, this is an inconvenience to the rest of prisoners who do not deserve death.
Apparently, the advocates consider that it would be appropriate if the convicted persons would be hanged regularly and urgently, specifically to decongest the cells!
The solution to the death penalty would mainly be to educate ourselves of the fact that it is a violation of human rights to kill. Life is the greatest gift from the Creator, befitting for all; people who are considered as ‘holy’ and those regarded as ‘evil.
One would concur with Dr. Sengondo Mvungi and Prof. Ibrahim Lipumba - acknowledging that hanging a transgressor is not a deterrent to crimes. Therefore, besides holding a national debate on the death penalty, research should be carried out to determine what makes people kill, and reach an equable conclusion.
A dead wrongdoer cannot repent and be reformed to be useful to the community. Punishment should be a means of rehabilitating an offender. The hanging of a reprobate does not compensate the offended party, apart from giving a wild sense of relief through revenge.
Many times, the suspected offender might not really have committed the crime. When this comes to light after they have been put to death, no amount of human effort could repair the damage. Besides, no offence makes anyone of us so inhuman as to deserve death because “an eye for an eye would make the whole world blind”.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen