Should Death Penalty be revived in Sri
Lanka ?
To kill or not to killthat is the question. Today, Sri Lanka has a total
prison population of sixteen thousand including a thousand inmates who
are awaiting the gallows. Following the end of the civil war, violent
crime in the country seems to have seen a rise and more and more
people have been demanding the death penalty be re-instated as a means
of deterrence against crime. However, this has aroused much
controversy as death penalty abolitionists have also come forward
voicing their views on the matter.
Death penalty or capital punishment, in its broadest sense, is the
execution of a person convicted of a serious crime following the final
judgment by a competent court after a fair trial. It is a legal penalty in
Sri Lanka and the penal code of the country lists a number of crimes
punishable by death, including premeditated murder, aiding and abetting
of suicide, perjury resulting in the execution of an innocent person and
high treason against the Republic. In spite of that, not a single execution
has taken place in the country in forty years as successive presidents
declined to sign the death orders effectively reducing all the death
sentences issued usually to life imprisonments without parole.
The method of execution practiced in Sri Lanka is hanging or the
suspension of a person by neck till death. The condemned prisoner
slowly dies of strangulation which typically takes around ten to twenty
minutes resulting in a considerably elongated and painful death.
Hanging itself is a medieval procedure when compared to modern
methods like electrocution or lethal injection which are presumed to
bring about instant death. However, all these methods with varying
levels of suffering inflicted upon the condemned are considered to be
equally effective as long as the end result is the same.
The reason behind the ever increasing demand in the country for the
implementation of the death penalty cannot be singled out. Many factors
varying from the public sympathy towards victims of crimes, the desire
of the society to exact vengeance upon criminal offenders, the release of
misleading information to the public by the authorities as well as the
dramatization of crimes by mainstream media have contributed. It is
often observed that Sri Lankans call for death penalty from time to time
when theres a sensational murder or an atrocity surfacing the media but
this demand has never been consistent. The most recent examples are
from 2015, as you all may remember, when people took to the streets
demanding death penalty for the people accused of raping and
murdering a seventeen year old girl in Jaffna and again for the person
accused of abduction, rape and murder of a five year old girl in
Kotadeniyawa. These incidents gave rise to much debate over whether
death penalty was indeed a necessary evil.
The primary argument against the imposition of death penalty is that it
violates the fundamental principles of morality. If its wrong for one
individual to kill another then it should be unacceptable for the state to
cause a persons death in civilized societies. The state, as a collective of
individuals, should not generally have moral rights the individuals do
not have themselves. Further, an individuals right to life is indisputable.
Death penalty is believed by many to be the worst violation of human
rights, an irreversible denial of human rights. The counter argument to
this is that the moment an individual takes the life of another person, he
forfeits his own right to life. But we have to ask ourselves whether
murdering a murderer takes any variable out of the killing equation.
Three major purposes of punishment are incapacitation, deterrence and
retribution. Incapacitation is the prevention of a felon from committing
crimes. This is achieved via either incarceration or execution. Deterrence
is discouraging the public from committing crimes by way of instilling
the fear of punishment. As life is dear to all, it is often speculated that
the fear of death would be the most effective antidote against capital
offenses. So it is fairly reasonable to expect the crime rate of a country
where capital punishment is functional, to be considerably lower than a
country where it is not practiced. In thirty one states out of fifty in the
United States, death penalty is legal and fully functional although they
have never exhibited any drastic decline of crimes compared to the other
states. Retribution is the idea that the society which represents the victim
of a crime is entitled to get an eye for an eye from the offender. This
itself is morally flawed and brings the image of the civilized society
down to pure barbarism. Despite that, the desire for vengeance continues
to remain a major ingredient in the public popularity for capital
punishment.
Perhaps the greatest danger of reviving death penalty lies in the fact that
the judiciary system of the country is far from perfect resulting in the
possibility of innocent people being convicted and executed.
Prosecutors, jurors and judges are all prone to human error and perjury
by witnesses is not unheard of in Sri Lanka. And capital punishment is
irreversible. As long as human justice remains fallible, the risk of
executing the innocent can never be eliminated.
The ideal response of a civilized society to an offender would be
directing the offender through a process of rehabilitation from which he
would emerge purged of evil. However this cannot be achieved in
practical reality because the human society is not something thats
absolutely civilized and such a process of rehabilitation hasnt been
invented yet. Its a fact that Sri Lankan prison system is a failure as it is
in many other countries. Rehabilitation of felons inside the prison is not
seen as a possibility nor does life imprisonment carry any benefit for
prisoners over execution as they are destined to die inside the prison
either way. Some people argue that life imprisonment without parole is
the better option as it prevents the wrongful execution of the innocent.
But it also denies the prisoner of the possibility of redemption as much
as the death penalty itself.
Even if ten people on death row are executed every day, the thousand of
them can be dealt with in less than four months; still, it would not
prevent future crimes from happening. The root causes of crime
including poverty, illiteracy, sexual stress and general dissatisfaction in
life of people from which crime stems and propagates have to be
addressed in order to actually curb crime rate of the country. For a
government, it is always convenient to just execute a criminal than to
examine and eliminate the conditions that compelled him to turn into a
criminal in the first place. And this is where the attitude of the people
has to change because taking to the streets a couple of times a year
demanding death to a murderer or a rapist may compensate for the lack
of action in their mundane lives but it never solves any of these
problems in the long run. In a fundamentally flawed society where the
public safety is maintained by the elimination of offenders via a faulty
system, it would be wise to remember that even those who campaign
today for the revival of death penalty may someday find themselves
being railroaded to the death row by the agents of the defective system
they once fathered.
