Few issues highlight the political differences between modern nations more starkly than their attitudes towards the death penalty. More than 80 countries have dispensed with capital punishment during the last 35 years and two major international organizations have also made its abolition a priority. The European Union requires member nations to forgo executions in practice even if they are not prepared to abolish the penalty, and in December 2007 the UN General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution for its members to implement “a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.” At the time, Amnesty International noted that just six countries (China, Iran, Iraq, the United States, Pakistan and Sudan) were responsible for almost 90 per cent of the world’s executions.
The release of Iwao Hakamada, a 78-year-old Japanese man believed to be the world’s longest serving death row inmate, offers yet another glimpse into the miscarriages of justice that can result in countries that sill have capital punishment. Like many death row prisoners in the Caribbean, Hakamada insisted that his conviction relied on confessions extracted after forceful interrogations by the police – including beatings and sleep deprivation. (Police records show that he was interrogated for some 240 hours in a 20-day period, a point at which almost anyone would admit to a crime rather than endure further abuse.) But if his lawyers had not argued successfully, just a few years ago, for the introduction of DNA evidence that appeared to exonerate him, Hakamada would likely have died in prison, broken by the strain of waiting for an impending execution.
Mounting evidence of Mr Hakamada’s innocence has raised serious questions about the wisdom of retaining capital punishment in a country with a conviction rate higher than 99 per cent, especially since well-publicized instances of abusive police work have shaken public confidence in Japan’s criminal justice. Many traditional arguments about the unfairness of capital punishment – racial bias, inefficient prosecutions – do not apply in Japan, which makes the case of Mr Hakamada all the more striking. One judge from his original trial has admitted being pressured into agreeing to the capital conviction despite having serious doubts at the time. (Japan adopted a jury system for most of its criminal cases only a few years ago.) If these sorts of errors can occur in such a highly ordered society, it should be no surprise that much worse abuses are commonplace elsewhere.
Human rights groups have chronicled the flaws of capital punishment in countries like China, Syria and Iran exhaustively, but some of the most compelling evidence against the death penalty comes from the United States, where the Innocence Project has used DNA evidence to secure 314 post-conviction exonerations in the last 25 years. Chillingly, more than ten per cent of these convictions were for capital crimes, nearly two-thirds of the innocent men were African-Americans, and at least 29 had pleaded guilty to crimes which they had not committed.
Setting aside the incalculable moral cost of wrongful convictions, there are practical arguments against capital punishment too. A few years ago the state of New Jersey suspended capital punishment shortly after it calculated that it could save its taxpayers US$1.3 million per death row inmate by commuting capital crimes to life sentences. Since the US currently spends in excess of $75 billion annually keeping more than 2 million of its citizens behind bars, economic arguments have often succeed where moral suasion has failed.
Capital punishment remains on the books in Guyana, even though it has been obsolete for all practical purposes for more than 15 years. In the early 1990s public confidence in the criminal justice system was badly shaken by the execution of Sylvester Sturge, which went ahead despite a co-accused’s eleventh-hour assertion of his innocence. (A view contested forcefully by former acting High Commissioner to London, Philip Allsopp, in a December 2012 letter to the Catholic Standard.) Even so, the release of Mr Hakamada, and scores of other death row prisoners around the world, has demonstrated, repeatedly, the dangers of retaining capital punishment in policing environments that routinely rely on confessions given under duress – as is the case in Guyana and through much of the Caribbean. Our de facto moratorium on capital punishment is a good start, and consistent with the general trend towards its eventual abolition worldwide. Nevertheless, a reasonable debate about the death penalty – including its inevitably imperfect application – is long overdue in this country. Surely our politicians can either explicitly reject what is a demonstrably questionable and highly flawed system, or cogently explain their reasons for not doing so.
