Making Death Row obsolete

Oct 01, 2013 Editorial

Guyana is at present deliberating the wisdom of maintaining the death penalty on the statutes. Many countries have abolished the death penalty, some from as far back as five or more decades ago when the world began moving to the position that to kill someone was barbaric.
The United Nations spearheaded the campaign against the death penalty; the body created some conventions and before long many countries became signatories to the convention. Guyana was one such signatory but it withdrew from certain aspects of the convention. The death penalty clause was one of them.
Many prisoners on Death Row began to petition the United Nations. Such was their determination to fight the gallows that the matter reached the National Assembly and it remains there to this day. A few months ago Guyana at the United Nations meeting presented its report on many aspects, including human rights and the rights of the child. The death penalty is seen as a violation of the right to life under the Human Rights convention.
The result is that the Parliamentary Select Committee of the National Assembly is now deliberating the issue of corporal punishment and the death penalty with a view to abolishing them. However, the nation is sharply divided on both issues.
Those who support the death penalty argue that it is only fair for the person who deprived someone of his life to lose his own by judicial means. The opponents of the death penalty say that execution makes the state as barbaric and equally guilty as the person who kills someone.
These conflicting views actually forced the government to fashion certain conditions under which the death penalty could be executed. The late President Desmond Hoyte, when the nation was in the throes of a crime wave at a time when people forced their way into homes and robbed and killed people, ordered that the death penalty be applied to such people.
It would seem that capital punishment did the trick because such crimes immediately disappeared from national life. The state then proclaimed that it would not execute anyone guilty of a crime of passion but that it would not spare those who in pursuit of crime, would kill another person.
It has been sixteen years since the last execution in Guyana. Since then more than two dozen people have been sentenced to death but the sentence is not being carried out largely because of a legal challenge and largely because the government is not inclined to face the wrath of the section of the international community opposed to the death penalty.
And so there is a judge who believes in alternative sentencing. Having taken note of the reluctance on the part of the state to execute the death penalty the judge has worked out a penalty system that is effective. He said that his system achieves the same result as the death penalty; it keeps the individual off the streets for a very long time, if not forever.
Guyana does not impose a system in which the court encroaches into the area of the court. For example, in the United States judges sentences people to a term of imprisonment without parole. In Guyana parole the prerogative of the prison system so no judge can rule that a prisoner must be denied parole.
Over the past year, the courts commuted many death sentences to life sentences much to the anger of the relatives of the victims. Indeed some of those whose sentences were commuted had been on Death Row for nearly two decades. Some had been there for longer.
The court found that the men were not being executed and that they had been there for longer than a traditional life sentence. But the relatives feel that the intention was to keep to men off the streets for good.
When the National Assembly completes its deliberation on the issue one may find that the vast majority of the people in the society would opt for the death penalty to remain on the statutes. But will it be applied? If a law is not applied then it becomes obsolete.

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Making Death Row obsolete

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