Cloud hanging over death sentence

Activists want it abolished, victims want culprits punished. Where do we draw the line?

AS she took the last 15 steps of her life, the woman wept. The sobbing was audible, but there were no tears. She had none left to shed.

For days on death row, she had been crying her heart out. And until her dying breath, she had maintained that the drugs she was caught with had belonged to her boyfriend.

But both of them were hanged, she in the Kajang women’s prison and he in Taiping.

“It was quite sad, but what to do? You commit the crime, you face the penalty,” says the man who was with her to the last, a former hangman who wanted to be known only as AK.

Cases like these have raised the question: Should the mandatory death penalty be abolished? In fact, should the death penalty be scrapped completely?

It’s a difficult question.

Most victims – and their families – want the culprits to pay with their lives. An eye for eye, they say.

Others say the state does not need the burden of having to feed, clothe and house the prisoner for decades. Even hangings are expensive. The hangman’s rope alone costs about RM6,000.

But there are also those who think the death penalty is abhorrent. It is an irreversible act.

If, by some chance, a man who is hanged is later found to be innocent, what recourse is there for him or his family?

It has been known to happen.

There’s this story going around WhatsApp about George Stinney Jr, the youngest person to be sentenced to death in the 20th century in the United States.

He was only 14 when he was executed in an electric chair.

Despite having an alibi, he was found guilty of killing two white girls, whose bodies were found near his house.

After 81 days in prison, the boy, whose parents were refused access to him, was electrocuted; he had 5,380 volts of electricity surging into his head.

But 70 years later, his innocence was finally proven. The judge who cleared him in 2014 declared that he had been handed a cruel and unusual punishment.

Those calling for the abolition of the death sentence would agree. Amnesty International, for one, calls the death sentence the a cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.

The state, it says, should not take it upon itself to kill anyone, no matter the offence.

“So many people have been executed, but the murders and drug trafficking have not ended. So, the death penalty is not effective,” it says.

Even the United Nations Human Rights Committee says “the death penalty cannot be reconciled with full respect for the right to life”.

But there’s another side to the coin. Al Jazeera reported the case of four-year-old Nurul Hanim and her younger brother, one-year-old Mohamad Hafiz, who were stabbed to death in their beds in 2019.

Their parents, Idris and Shila, are still reeling from their loss, and want the murderer to hang.

“My friends and I all want him dead,” says Idris. “But if there is no death penalty in Malaysia ... if he goes free and gets to come back ... we can also murder him.”

An eye for an eye does make the world go blind, like Mahatma Gandhi once said. Ending the death penalty could see people taking things into their own hands.

In April, Malaysian Nagaenthran Dharmalingam was executed in Singapore’s Changi prison.

He is said to have had learning disabilities and a low IQ, and the law says the disabled must not be put to death.

But the Singapore government brushed off claims of disability and hanged him anyway.

The Malaysian government tried to stop the execution and has now agreed in principle to abolish the mandatory death penalty. Instead, judges will be given the discretion to decide on the appropriate punishment.

But will that solve the problems? Many still feel it is unfair that drug traffickers who destroy thousands of lives and murderers can be allowed to walk free after a prison term.

Another hangman, who wanted to be known as RS, is among those who think so.

The mandatory death sentence is not arbitrary, he insists.

These condemned people have gone through at least three courts, and even appealed to the Pardons Board.

There is little likelihood of them being innocent. “From my experience, most of the condemned finally accept that they are guilty and are ready to die,” he says.

Many of them are brutal murderers; some of them have raped, killed and mutilated their victims.

“There was one who owned a bakery with a kiln. He burnt his victims in the kiln. And he baked his bread there too.

“Imagine, people were eating bread from a kiln where others had been cremated!

“Those victims never had a chance. The guilty must be made to pay and the punishment must match the crime,” says RS.

He has a different solution. If the government wants to abolish the mandatory death sentence, he says, we should bring back the jury system.

Giving the discretion solely to the judge may not solve the problem. After all, judges are also human. They can be swayed by personal feelings or even religious beliefs.

Some may be against the killing of another person and others may prefer the “diya” system that is being bandied about – one where the convicted murderer can pay a certain sum of money to evade punishment.

A jury, however, can be more discerning. After all, there will be several people of diverse backgrounds deciding on the punishment. The judge can still have his say.

That way, we can probably be more certain that there is no doubt about the guilt of the condemned.

A lot, of course, will depend on the quality of jurors. And in Malaysia, that could be another problem.