|
|
The Cruelty of the Death Penalty!
|
 |
International law states that torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment can never dejustified. The cruelty of the death penalty is evident. Like torture, an execution constitutes an extreme physical and mental assault on a person already rendered helpless by government authorities.
If hanging a woman by her arms until she experiences excruciating pain is rightly condemned as torture, how does one describe hanging her by the neck until she dead? If administering 100 volts of electricity to the most sensitive parts of a man’s body evokes disgust, what is appropriate reaction to the administration of 2,000 volts to his body in order to kill him? Does using the legal process to impose these cruelties make their inhumanity justifiable?
Hanging and shooting are the most common methods of execution in use today. Death by electrocution, poisonous gas and lethal injection of poison are used in the USA alone. Under Islamic law, beheading is prescribed in five countries and stoning in seven countries. Occasionally, there are reports of other methods being used. Three prisoners were executed by being pushed off a cliff according to a report in the Iranian press in October 1987; they were said to have chosen this method in preference to being crushed to dead or beheaded.
But, whatever the method of execution used, prisoners can suffer anguished deaths.
A Thai construction worker hanged in Kuwait in 1981 took more than nine minutes to die because, as medical reports revealed afterwards, his slight weight did not suffice to break his neck. He died of strangulation. As he stood on the gallows beforehand, facing the crowd, the Arab Times reported, “for a moment his face expressed all the incomprehension, anguish and desperation”. Another Thai, executed with him, broke down in tears and protested his innocence before being led to the gallows.
James Autry was executed by lethal injection in Texas on 14 March 1984. The US news magazine Newsweek reported that he “took at least ten minutes to die and throughout much of that time was conscious, moving about and complaining of pain”. A prison doctor, who was present at the execution, was later reported to have said that the catheter needle may have become clogged, slowing down the execution.
Efforts have been made to minimize the suffering caused to a prisoner who is executed. That is why electrocution was introduced in the USA in 1889 it was considered more humane than hanging and why prisoners facing the electric chair in the Philippines before the death penalty was abolished in 1987 could choose to be anaesthetized first.
In other countries, however, the pain of execution has been deliberately increased. In Nigeria execution usually by firing-squad in public is the mandatory punishment for prisoners convicted of armed robbery. In July 1986 the Military Governor of Niger State ordered that successive volleys of bullets fired at intervals should execute people convicted of armed robbery slowly, starting with shots aimed at the ankles. In response to protests about this particularly cruel method of execution, a state official said that the aim had been to cause suffering to the condemned men and to deter other criminals, and that two people had been executed in this way.
Stoning to death is one of the methods of execution practiced in Iran. The procedure is designed to ensure that death does not come quickly from a single blow. The Islamic Penal Code of Iran stipulates: “In the punishment of stoning to death, the stones should not be so large that the person dies on being hit by one or two of them; they should not be so small either that they could not be defined as stones”. A report allegedly from eye-witness to a stoning reads: The lorry deposited a large number of stones and pebbles beside the waste ground, and then two women were lead to the spot wearing white and with sacks over their heads. They were enveloped in a shower of stones and transformed into two red sacks. The wounded women fell to the ground and revolutionary Guards smashed their heads in with a shovel to make sure that they were dead.”
The cruelty of execution is not restricted to the prisoner’s death agonies. Its unique pain which developing more humane methods of killing cannot reduce- lies in the grief and terror with which many of the victims approach their deaths.
|
|
|
| JOIN MAILING LIST |
 |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
| Letters to the Editor |
|
|
|
|
| Letters by Sr. Pilar |
|
|
|
|
| Love Life TV |
|
|
|
| MAGAZINE |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| HOT TOPICS |
|
|
|
|
|
| ANTI LIFE ISSUES |
|
|
| |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
