By Leon Rockliffe
These thoughts on the matter of the so-called death penalty are a long held personal reaction to the topic and are excited into print by last week’s thought-provoking Guyana Bar Association column by Teni Housty.
A penalty or punishment must involve the infliction of:
● Pain/suffering
● Deprivation of some amenity like joy, healthiness, visual
entertainment/social intercourse
● Economic loss/incapacity to earn
● Deprivation or confiscation of an asset like money, property of any kind.
The essential feature of the above is that in all cases they must be felt, suffered, sensed or appreciated by the person penalized.
From the moment of clinical death the victim loses the capacity to sense or appreciate any of them. Without such sense or appreciation, then, how could a man be said to suffer the so-called penal imposition of capital punishment. The man is at an end. There is no man to feel the impact of the so called punishment.
With the explanation that the condemned man is being ‘punished’ thus clearly rebutted, we must now find a proper definition of our action in the termination of that life.
Justice
This term we call in aid to give moral quality to our act of execution of the individual. Such a person ought not to be allowed to continue his existence among us having regard to the heinous nature of his/her crime, so we are justified in his elimination by whatever physical means. And we retire to bed with the comfortable thought that the ends of justice have been served.
I have on purpose avoided that almost interminable debate concerning man’s entitlement to play God and determine our right to end a life which we did not and could not give or restore. Another time, another place.
I similarly avoid our re-think of the element of doubt embarrassingly exposed when erroneous convictions are exposed by such discomforting scientific intrusions as DNA testing. This is merely related to the elimination of reasonable doubt, which should be absent when we make the fateful decision to tighten the noose, pull the trigger or lever, or gently administer what we calmly describe as a lethal injection. None of this assists us in determining the very simple matter of the effect of our infliction upon a fellow human being of those so called penalties.
However we righteously approach the matter, the comforting conclusion that we are administering social justice does not assist in the determination of the elementary question, to wit, is the infliction of the death penalty a punishment at all? The honest application of the simple test proposed at the beginning of this note ought to produce the single answer that death could not be penal. And so it is nakedly revealed for what it ever was – revenge!
A dear lady named Elizabeth Fry, an English Quaker prison reformer of the early nineteenth century wrote “punishment is not for Revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.” The good lady could hardly have been advocating the reform of a guy whose neck you vengefully popped this morning. She must have been referring to a miscreant who is allowed to remain alive and have his mind chastened by the punishment he would suffer.
But nowhere is the element of revenge more clearly demonstrated than in the criminal justice system of the United States of America. The trial is ended. The jury must recommend the punishment to be inflicted upon the accused on whose guilt they have recently pronounced. The judge, good and true, must pay regard to the exhortations of Gilbert and Sullivan and let the punishment fit the crime: an objective test where consideration of social conditions, the personal circumstances of the guilty party, prevalence of and deterrence from the crime are expected to advise the ultimate judicial sentence. And then plain revenge is allowed to enter the proceedings in the form of testimonies from the family of the victim of the crime who, without any inhibition, parade their personal emotions and all of the ills and distresses to which the deeply offended human body and soul are subject.
The general objective of this pathetic exercise is to allow the offended victims to influence the Court that the only event that could in any way serve to assuage their distraught emotions is the infliction of death upon the guilty party. Nothing else would suffice to bring closure to this most unforgivable assault upon their well-being but this Court imposed act of revenge. Yes, revenge is what I said – unmasked, unmitigated revenge.
And so my brother Housty may be eased in spirit and remove from our judges the burden of determination of the infliction of the death sentence upon our fellow man. They are prisoners of the laws we make through our Parliament and the social values that are normally there reflected. Revenge? God forbid!
