Opinion polls have always shown that Jamaicans favour the death penalty. According to an Observer/Stone Poll on hanging in November 2005, 76 per cent of our numbers so favoured the death penalty. This is perhaps not surprising when one considers that for the said year (2005 ), according to police records,87 children were killed.
I have always been of the view that Capital punishment is the natural emotional response to gruesome murders and in fact any deprivation of human life. For a new state of mind to emerge, we as a people will need to move away from emotionalism and into the realms of rationality. This article I suppose, can be said to be in the aim of engendering that new state of mind.
When an individual commits a crime, he commits an act not only against the individual but one against the state. He therefore owes a debt to the state and ought to be allowed the opportunity to repay his debt to the society he has offended. Hanging our able bodied manpower resource can never restore that which has been lost.
It is quite possible that there would be less of a public outcry to hang convicted killers if work programmes were standardised in the prison system, allowing for some form of restitution.
One mother whose 16 year-old daughter was kidnapped, raped, murdered and left in a cave in St Ann five years ago has rightly made the query as to what compensation the state can give to her for the life of her only daughter who was slaughtered on her way to school. The obvious truth is that nothing can truly compensate for her loss. That is undeniable.
On the other hand however, there was one most gruesome and well publicised murder of a popular 44 year old man in the early 1980’s. The society clamoured for revenge, demanded that his murderer be executed. Indeed he eventually was, and the general view was that was the end of the matter. But it was not. What the said society did not consider was that the murdered man was the sole bread winner of his family and left behind a wife and 9 children who then had to fend for themselves As the years rolled by, they fared quite badly and while one daughter distinguished herself in the field of nursing, her other three sisters all became prostitutes (one has since died of AIDS); two brothers were killed by the police; another was stabbed on a bus and beaten to death by passengers when he tried to pick another passengers pocket; one became a coke addict while the youngest son has been in and out of prison for the last 20 years for offences ranging from selling marijuana to robbery with aggravation.
Indeed, at least some of our street children, prostitutes, prison population, unskilled and uneducated have emerged from a similar state of affairs. They have had the pillar of their social and economic existence swept away by some murder which took away a loved one. When we believe therefore that by hanging the murderers, we as a society have solved the problem, we commit the cardinal error of ignorance.
We will never be truly able to say how many of these children would have had better lives if they had not lost the breadwinners of their family. What is sure is that under our present system they did not stand much of a chance in an environment of scarcity. Would they not have fared better if the society were one where restitution played a more pre eminent role in the dispensation of Justice.
The point is that hanging does not solve the varied problems that may arise from the loss of a loved one and furthermore, hanging the murderer will not compensate the families of the victim for their loss.
WAYNE DENNY
ATTORNEY-AT-LAW
\PRIVY COUNCIL LEGAL OFFICER
KINGSTON COLLEGE OLD BOY
