Unthinkable for a civilised nation

Despite this, there has been a steady momentum internationally to abolish death penalty. Until 1965 only 12 countries had abolished capital punishment and another 11 for ordinary crimes during peacetime. The Amnesty International states that today 68 countries have abolished death penalty for all crimes and 14 for ordinary crimes. All the 15 members of the European Union have abolished capital punishment. In fact, today, the EU actively promotes the cause of its abolition. In South Africa the new Constitutional Court in one of its first judgments in 1995 abolished death penalty as “cruel, inhuman and degrading”. The three international treaties — optional protocols to the European and American conventions on human rights and to the International covenants on civil and political rights — call for its abolition. InApril 1999 the UN Commission on Human Rights in its annual meeting has called for its restriction and eventual abolition.

The major argument for abolition is that there is no evidence to support the deterrent theory of capital punishment. Statistics reveal that the overwhelming majority of killers commit the offence in momentary aberration. Majority of them are perfectly ordinary people without any criminal antecedents who use violence against victims whom they know at the spur of the moment. Most of the killings are for personal and emotional reasons like rage, jealousy and quarrels. Many of the killers feel terribly ashamed after committing the act and about 20 percent commit suicide later. The argument of professional criminals, and pre-meditated crimes being among the majority of cases, do not stand the test of statistical details. It is argued that even in these extreme and relatively rare cases the cause of deterrence is served as much by long imprisonment, that could be for 30 years or more, as bydeath sentence.

In a letter to the Guardian a large number of eminent psychiatrists from the London Institute of Psychiatry made some important points against capital punishment. They contend that the prisons are already stretched to the limit because of a mistaken approach to criminal penology. Executions dehumanise both the staff and the prisoner alike. Death penalty would make murder trials much more subjective and less objective, devaluing courts and the legal process. Since under the death sentence the condemned persons become new victims and gain most the support, the actual victims of crime whose needs are considerable find their chances of support receding.

There are added reasons for its abolition in poor countries like India where the legal process takes unduly a very long time and where the poor hardly get any worthwhile legal assistance. The case against hanging, as summed up by the Economist, is that it is not only “unthinkable for a civilised nation” but “less useful for a societythat wishes to deter crime.”

The writer teaches political science at Delhi University