IT WOULD have come as no surprise that some 79 per cent of respondents to the recent NATION-commissioned CADRES poll on the very sensitive issue of the death penalty, favour the resumption of execution by hanging those convicted for the crime of murder.
After all, this seems to be the general sentiment across our Caribbean Community, and certainly in countries with high murder rates, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, for example.
“Hang them” has become a familiar cry, captured in media headlines, for those overwhelmed by grisly statistics of murder. Among the victims are young and old women and men and even primary and secondary schoolchildren.
While it would be difficult not to appreciate the anguish that fuels the crescendo of cries for implementation of the death penalty – which remains on the statute book in every CARICOM state – it is also advisable to temper such a demand with the rather sobering reality that so many emotionally refuse to recognise.
The reality is that, based on cold, empirical data, the death penalty has NOT proven to be an effective deterrent to murder; and not just in the Caribbean, or in other poor and developing nations, but also in rich, developed and powerful countries.
Currently, a raging debate is taking place in Trinidad and Tobago in which leading cabinet ministers are among advocates joining the shrill “pop-their-necks” clamour to enforce the death penalty.
It is a scenario too familiar to Jamaicans and Guyanese, as well as St Lucians and Bahamians, whenever there is an upsurge in murder rates.
But judicial killing, either by swinging convicted murderers on the gallows, or by lethal injection, is yet to prove an effective alternative to the strengthening and modernising of security forces; the pursuit of enlightened policies and programmes on penal reform; and the systematic operation of properly supervised rehabilitation centres, particularly for young and first offenders.
European and North American nations that once found it necessary – under pressures from their own human rights organisations – to signal disapproval of the penalty in developing countries, have been seeking to avoid any connection between the economic aid being offered and the right of recipient countries to implement the death penalty.
The latest indication of this has come from the European Union to coincide with yesterday’s observance of World And European Day Against The Death Penalty.
In reaffirming opposition to the death penalty as “a cruel and inhumane punishment”, the EU has made clear that its aid would not be withheld from countries whose legal system provides for such punishnment for murder.