Is it time to abolish the death penalty?
The death penalty is error-ridden, arbitrarily imposed and unfairly targets the poor
As a punishment, the death penalty makes no sense: how does killing a person who has killed a person show that killing is wrong? Most of the civilised world has abolished it. India certainly does not need it as it serves no purpose. No study has shown that the death penalty deters murder more than life imprisonment. The evidence is all to the contrary. For deterrence to work, the severity of the punishment has to coexist with the certainty and swiftness of the punishment. The death penalty has not deterred terrorism, murder or even theft. For over a century, stealing attracted the death penalty in England, where spectators at public hangings often had their pockets picked!
Problems with death penalty
The death penalty is error-ridden. Between January 1, 2000 and June 31, 2015, the Supreme Court imposed 60 death sentences. It subsequently admitted that it had erred in 15 of them (25%). Can this system be trusted to take a life? And that too based on evidence collected, or fabricated, by a police force not known for its probity or efficiency?
The death penalty unfairly targets the poor and marginalised. Those without capital get the punishment. Penurious prisoners on legal aid get it the most, while others with private lawyers remain untouched.
The death penalty is impossible to administer fairly or rationally. The Supreme Court has repeatedly admitted that it has arbitrarily imposed this most extreme punishment. Executions occurred in 5.2 cases for every 1 lakh murders. Such a selection cannot but be freakish. It depends overwhelmingly on the adjudicator’s personal beliefs. Judges opposed to it never gave a death sentence; those in favour doled it out. Abolitionist Presidents (S. Radhakrishnan and A.P. J. Abdul Kalam) refused to reject mercy petitions, while others, differently inclined, readily denied clemency. Should the killing of a human being depend on the philosophy of a particular individual?
Abolishing the death penalty will ease, not enhance, the tax-payer’s burden. The annual cost of maintaining a prisoner is about Rs. 30,000. The hangman is paid more, and we also save on the protracted litigation that death cases involve.
Constitutional, legal and policy issues cannot be determined by the victim’s understandable hunger for revenge without leading to a frenzy where the death penalty is demanded, as it often is, for wholly inappropriate cases (accidental deaths, cheating, etc.). If life imprisonment sufficed for the 99.99% of victims’ families, why not for the minuscule fraction in whose name the death penalty is demanded?
Punish, yes, but why in the same cold-blooded, premeditated and brutal manner as the prisoner killed his or her victim? Punishment should not imitate crime. We do not rape rapists, or maim and disfigure those who have done this to others. Why do we have to kill killers?
A safer country
India’s murder rate has declined continuously since 1991 and is at present the lowest in our recorded history except for 1963. Fearmongering aside, we are safer today than our parents or grandparents ever were. And this is not thanks to the death penalty whose infrequent and arbitrary implementation has made no real difference. It may as well have not been there. Studies show that a more equal sex ratio has more to do with declining murder rates than killing murderers.
Nobody wants to undergo the trauma of administering the death penalty — not the higher courts and not the hapless prison staff who have to see a human being die gasping at the end of a rope. Governments kill prisoners to show that they are tough on crime. There is nothing muscular or tough about killing a man who is at your mercy.
Source: The Hindu, 14.12.2018
