----------------------------------- The right to life is inalienable, and was affirmed universally in article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It was subsequently reinforced by several key international and regional treaties, among them the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the American Charter on Human Rights, and the African Charter on Human and People's Rights. Because human rights are universal and unconditional, the fact that someone has committed a crime - even a heinous one - does not strip him or her of the right to life.
--------------------- Flaws in the criminal justice systems mean that the innocent, as well as the guilty, get executed. The death penalty does not leave room for error, and it is by definition irrevocable. The Death Penalty Information Center, a US-based NGO, lists 124 people who have since 1973 been exonerated because they were acquitted at a re-trial, all charges were dropped, or they were given an absolute pardon in the light of new evidence. Another American non-profit body, the Innocence Project, seeks to clear the innocent through DNA testing. Its website asks people to note that those who have been pardoned are not the only ones to have been wrongfully convicted. Also, DNA testing can serve a purpose only when biological evidence is actually available. The application of the death penalty is subject to discrimination, with race, age, gender and social class playing a prominent role in sentencing and access to legal representation. A saying attributed to inmates on death row in the US runs: “Them that has the capital don’t get the punishment.” The death penalty is also often meted out arbitrarily – with no common benchmarks, for instance, for what is punishable by death . In 2001 for example, a man in Washington state was executed for the murder of a woman after turning himself in, pleading guilty at the trial and waiving his right to appeal. Two years later, in the same state, another man – who had murdered 48 women – escaped the death penalty by cooperating with the authorities. He was instead imprisoned for life.
The death penalty does not deter crime . A global survey of capital punishment trends in 1999-2003 by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime concluded that there is no evidence to support the contention that capital punishment deters homicide more effectively than the threat of life imprisonment. In fact, some studies suggest the opposite. One, undertaken by the Death Penalty Information Center, shows that in the period 1990-2005 retentionist US states exhibited consistently higher murder rates than abolitionist ones (see below – the figures are based on population estimates by the US Census and murder rates from the FBI).
Source: Death Penalty Information Center Abolishing capital punishment does not encourage crime. A study by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, conducted in 1988 and updated in 2002, concluded that “the fact that statistics continue to point in the same direction is persuasive evidence that countries need not fear sudden and serious changes in the curve of crime if they reduce their reliance on the death penalty”. Crimes like murder are complex – the motivation to kill irreducible to a single cause. So the argument that ending the death penalty will produce a spike in crime is not plausible. This is why criminologists analyse murder rates over long-term cycles, taking into account economic deprivation and social and other factors. Some sociologists have even put forward the idea that the death penalty may exert a ‘brutalisation effect’ on society – by sanctioning violence as a method of redress, state-sponsored executions undermine the value of life. See, for example, the 1980 study by Bowers and Pierce of Northeastern University (‘Deterrence or Brutalization: What is the Effect of Executions?’ Crime & Delinquency 26, 1980).
Capital punishment usually costs much more than life imprisonment. The US government estimates that a single death penalty case, from the point of arrest through to execution, costs US $1-3 million. According to the US Bureau of Justice, the average cost of life imprisonment is approximately US $500,000. A 2003 report by the State of Kansas comparing the cost of the death penalty to that of life imprisonment estimated that, in death penalty cases, investigation costs were three times higher, trial costs were 16 times higher, and appeal costs 21 times higher. Proponents of the death penalty argue that capital punishment constitutes due punishment for the perpetrator and effective redress for the victims. But many families and friends of murder victims have spoken out against the death penalty, countering that killing the murderer will neither bring them justice nor help them heal.
Jennifer Bishop’s sister Nancy and her husband were murdered in 1990. Of their deaths and their killer Bishop said, “Our sister Nancy and her husband Richard were a young couple expecting their first child when they were shot to death in their home. They loved and valued life; our sister was carrying life within her when she died a terrifying and brutal death. Her last act as she was dying was to write a message of love in her blood. We can't imagine making the death of another human being her memorial.” --------------------------------- A human being is a human being - even after having committed a heinous crime legally punishable by death. Human rights are unconditional and inalienable, and cannot be handed out or revoked according to circumstance. Fundamental among basic human rights is that which provides that no one shall be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, enshrined in article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (CAT). ICCPR and CAT go beyond the right to life to address legal access and representation; conduct of hearings, trials and appeal procedures; and the treatment of those in jail. States parties to these treaties thus have a legal obligation to ensure that people on death row are treated justly and humanely. Abolitionists argue that being on death row is itself tantamount to torture, pointing to physical conditions (up to 23 hours a day in a small cell, with one hour of solitary recreation, subject to near continuous sensory deprivation and no or inadequate medical care), as well as severe psychological pressure. Many inmates are not told when they are to be executed; nor are their relatives. In most cases, time spent on death row is likely to amount to several years or even decades. Amnesty International, in its April 2007 report 'Stop the State Killing', estimates that it would take approximately 85 years to execute everyone on death row in the Pakistan, 60 to execute everyone on death row in the US, and 25 years to do the same in Japan. In Japan, where the incarceration period is so long, the majority of those on death row will not even survive to be executed. Conversely, in countries like Kuwait and Somalia, executions can be carried out within days or even hours of sentencing, with the type and severity of the execution method to be specified by the victims’ families. ~~~~~ The present trend towards abolition does not stem from a ‘squeamish’ aversion to violence or a delusional sympathy for criminals. The push to end capital punishment has as its basis, rather, the belief that effective criminal justice and secure, democratic societies cannot exist without the full recognition of human rights, which are by definition universal. The primary responsibility of a state is to keep its citizens safe. That capital punishment does not provide a route to this security has been proved; by nonetheless persisting to carry out ‘legalised murder’ in the name of security, states weaken the moral fabric of their societies and undermine respect for human rights among their citizens. ~~~~~ is this what justice looks like? Omar Hussein: Hussein was publicly executed in Somalia in May 2007. He was stabbed to death by the 16-year-old son of the man he had admitting stabbing to death, only hours after being sentenced. His sentence was carried out by a Shari’a court which does not allow the right to legal representation or appeal. Fujinami Yoshio and Akiyama Yoshimitsu: Fujinami (aged 75) and Akiyama (aged 77) were executed in Japan in December 2006 after decades on death row. Fujinami was taken to the gallows in the Tokyo Detention Centre in a wheelchair and Akiyama, partially blind and also unable to walk, had to be helped to the execution chamber by prison guards. Both had been appealing their sentences. Sanjaya Rowan Kumara: Kumara, a Sri Lankan national, was executed in Kuwait in November 2006. Declared dead, he was taken to the morgue where medical staff noticed he was still moving. According to reports, examinations showed a weak heartbeat. He was pronounced dead five hours after being hanged. Le Manh Luong: Luong was sentenced to death in November 2006 by the People’s Court of Quang Binh Province, Vietnam. The trial lasted five days. There are no jury trials in Vietnam. The judges, who sat next to the prosecutors, led the interrogation of the defendants. It was reported that Luong appeared to have great difficulty following what was going on, but medical evidence about his mental health, submitted by Luong’s lawyer, was ignored. |
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Can the state, which represents the whole of society and has the duty of protecting society, fulfil that duty by lowering itself to the level of the murderer, and treating him as he treated others? Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General, 1997-2006 The real security for human life is to be found in a reverence for it. If the law regarded it as inviolable, then the people would begin also so to regard it. A deep reverence for human life is worth more than a thousand executions in the prevention of murder; and is, in fact, the great security for human life. The law of capital punishment while pretending to support this reverence does in fact tend to destroy it. John Bright, English statesman and orator,1868 When we abolished the punishment for treason that you should be hanged and then cut down while still alive, then disemboweled while still alive, and then quartered, we did not abolish that punishment because we sympathised with traitors, but because we took the view that this was a punishment no longer consistent with our self-respect. Lord Chancellor Gardiner, during the death penalty abolition debates in the British Parliament, 1965 The right to life and dignity are the most important of all human rights, and the source of all other personal rights. By committing ourselves to a society founded on the recognition of human rights we are required to value these two rights above all others. And this must be demonstrated by the state in everything that it does, including the way it punishes criminals. This is not achieved by objectifying murderers and putting them to death to serve as an example to others in the expectation that they might possibly be deterred thereby. Justice Chaskalson, President of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa, 1995 An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organisation which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. Albert Camus, 'Reflections on the Guillotine, Resistance, Rebellion & Death', 1966 Whether a death sentence is carried out in six minutes, six weeks or six years, the person set for death begins to suffer the most cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment. Death row is segregated from the rest of the general inmate prison population. You’re warehoused for death, treated like contaminated meat to be disposed of. You sit there and await death, and the pain you know will come to you one day. Darby Tillis, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for the 1977 armed robbery and murder of the owner and an employee of a hotdog stand on the north side of Chicago With the benefit of DNA evidence, we have learned that a substantial number of death sentences have been imposed erroneously ... [A] significant number of defendants in capital cases have not been provided with fully competent legal representation at trial. John Paul Stevens, US Supreme Court Justice, 2005
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