Put the Retention of Capital Punishment to a Referendum

Dec 19, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
On an almost daily basis we are treated to reports of very violent and even macabre crimes being committed in our country. Along with these heinous acts of criminality, are also the very frequent reports of suicides and road-traffic related deaths.  It leads one to wonder exactly how much value do Guyanese put on this most precious thing we call life.
What drives a bandit to threaten to kill a five-year old child in the course of a robbery, or to calmly beat a 77-year old woman to death in her home while ransacking her refrigerator?  What demonic possession prompts someone to dismember a woman in her home and then scatter the remains in the sea?  To some extent these and many more chilling crimes which took place this year in Guyana, were driven by rabid greed and lives that were hooked on drugs.  The flourishing drug trade in Guyana, clearly evidenced by the legions of demented vagrants who roam our streets, has its particular brand of violence.  In the past we have seen gang-related violence and instances of beheading synonymous with the kinds of messages transmitted between dishonourable drug-traders.
Individual criminality is in some ways goaded and reinforced by a system of organised crime in our country; persons with criminal intent seem to be emboldened to act out their fantasies by the much more spectacular crimes perpetrated by feuding gangs and drug lords.  “Guns for hire” criminals are also seemingly abundant, with the price for committing murder dropping because there are more and more willing killers available.  A few months back, we had a hired killer who entered a “hire-purchase” murder-for-credit agreement with the mastermind to carry out a hit on her ex-husband.
The rise and subsequent decline in gold-mining in our hinterland areas also seems to have become a major contributor to a continuous spate of killings in what is reminiscent of a “wild-west” scenario where it takes very little provocation to tick someone off to the point that they are ready to kill.  The price of someone’s life seems to be even cheaper in these territories.
We seem to know no end to the level of depravity that we can descend to.  Apart from crimes driven by greed and addiction, we also have had some sensational cases of crimes-of-passion, which point to an altogether different dimension to changing social behavioural patterns.  Take for instance the Neesa Gopaul case in which the court found a parent being complicit in the murder of her own child.
But exactly has allowed heinous crimes to reach the morbid level that we are at now? With regards to high-profile organized crimes, a 2012 study done by the Swiss group, Small-Arms Survey described Guyana as a “haven” and “fertile grounds” for gangs and organised-crime (SN, March 11, 2012).The study concluded that “should the country maintain its general sense of apathy towards gangs and organized crime, Guyana’s security situation will only continue to deteriorate”.  The study went on to say “corruption, especially in law enforcement and the judicial system, plays an important role in allowing gangs and organized crime elements to operate with impunity.”  But what about our sentencing policies?  We have a judge who has become a hero among the law-abiding for handing down some lengthy sentences for heinous crimes.  If sentenced by this judge, you have to have some Methuselah-genes in your blood to ever hope to see the light of day again.  Nice to have people like him around, but as a poor nation, can we really afford to maintain vicious killers in jail for such lengthy periods – 40 + years?  Even at a modest daily maintenance rate of $2,500 per prisoner (all related expenses considered) it would cost almost a million dollars a year to keep a prisoner behind bars.  What is the trade-off with society in these cases, how does a poor society actually benefit?
The ordinary man will conclude that to spend 40 million dollars at today’s rates on a single prisoner for the remainder of his life in jail, is a complete loss of welfare to society.  Why not go the other route, put his lights out at the end of the trial and end the misery for all involved – the victim’s family, the prison system, society at large, and even the convict?  It is not so easy after all! Even though our legal system provides for the imposition of the death penalty, and there is nothing preventing the carriage of justice in such cases, we have seldom had a judge pass the death sentence on a convicted killer for the past decade.  Exactly why is our judiciary this reluctant to impose capital punishment, when every John and Jane out in the public knows that the convicted should dangle at the end of a noose?
I humbly suggest that we include a referendum on the retention of the death penalty in our voting rights and duties when we go to the polls for Local Government Elections in March 2016.  It has happened in many other countries, that a referendum on a critical and divisive issue be included when an opportunity for elections is presented.  We can do the same and put this issue to rest.
Khemraj Tulsie

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