28 September 2000, 809 words
Supporting the death penalty is a sign of a primitive mind.
I mean this quite literally. Whenever you find an issue which the majority of people feel strongly about, it is likely that there is some evolutionary logic behind it. In the case of capital punishment, this logic is not complex.
The first human societies were bands. A band consists of only a few dozens of people, is nomadic, and has informal methods of resolving conflict. In such a society, justice would have been swift and personal. A man steals from you, you take back what is yours. A man attacks you, you fight back. A man kills your relative, you kill him. Those human beings who were unwilling or unable to follow these rules would have been eliminated by the process of natural selection (better known as "survival of the fittest").
Bands later became tribes and chiefdoms. These are made up, respectively, of hundreds or thousands of people, settlements, "big-man" or hereditary leadership, and have informal or centralized conflict resolution. In such societies, the big-man or tribal elders co-opted punishment as their own prerogative, not because of any commitment to justice, but because of their need to retain coercive power.
In the modern nation-state, however, the death penalty does not help preserve social stability, as it may have in tribes and chiefdoms. In such small societies, eliminating sociopaths has concrete effects. But the nation-state is too large and complex for this to work.
An efficient nation-state has to deal with social causes first and individual perpetrators second. And, because there is absolutely no evidence that executing murderers (or drug dealers or rapists) has any deterrent effect, and because a nation-state has the resources for permanent incarceration, executions becomes an immoral act.
Not only that, but the size of the society makes it inevitable that innocent persons will be executed. A recent US study of capital cases found that 85 percent of states which have the death penalty make serious legal errors in two-thirds of cases.
The commonest causes of error, says the report, were "egregiously incompetent defence lawyers who demonstrably missed important evidence, and police and prosecutors who did discover that kind of evidence but suppressed it." Moreover, seven percent of Death Row prisoners who were able to get their cases retried were found innocent.
Now, if the percentages are that high in the US, where they have a much better public defence system and the police actually know about DNA testing, imagine what the figures could be for our country, where a white boy walks free because the judge says the forensic scientist was unqualified and where an alarming number of police officers are corrupt, emotionally unstable or trigger-happy .
The inescapable conclusion is that there is no pragmatic, legal, ethical or moral reason to support the death penalty. But, even though human beings live in a modern world, we are biologically just the same as our prehistoric ancestors of 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. The reasoning of our brain's frontal lobes is coloured by the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ which is a centre of our emotions. We evolved to take revenge on those who endanger us and, even in our civilized world which disallows personal payback, we still hunger for the vicarious killing of those individuals who threaten our security.
Nonetheless, we are reasoning creatures. That is why, in countries which have abolished the death penalty and embarked on an educational campaign to tell the populace why, public support for capital punishment has fallen significantly (although never below a majority - not many people can defy their evolutionary conditioning).
Even so, the argument by Basdeo Panday and Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj that hanging should be implemented because it is "the will of the people" is a bogus one. After all, if the UNC leaders were so committed to the democratic will, they would have long launched an investigation into the airport expansion project and scuttled Clause Seven. By the logic of UNC democracy, Panday would even have stopped talking about "national unity", since every poll shows that the populace wants to vote by race.
No, the UNC leadership is gung-ho for hanging simply because they see it as a vote-catching strategy (although, in the case of Ramesh, I suspect deeper motives). And most of our elites, from influential businessmen to religious leaders to leading lawyers to pseudo-intellectual commentators, are solidly behind the government on this issue. And these people, not having even the excuse of wanting votes or not knowing better, can be in favour of capital punishment only because of their innate bloodthirstiness.
They, and our primal politics, are a strong argument that our society is in fact not yet mature enough to do away with the Privy Council.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh