Post by Anja Nieser on Sept 6, 2006 23:12:29 GMT -5
Lifting Capital Punishment - a Whirlpool
The New Times (Kigali)
OPINION
September 5, 2006
Posted to the web September 6, 2006
By Rwembeho Stephen
Kigali
Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they are right. The dead of the Rwandans accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of "Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the peace of Philip Gourevitch's book"; we wish to inform you... This makes the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda unique from other genocides.
It is this unspeakable crime against human that calls for punishment and the possibility of uniting a moral, economic and political shattered society of Rwanda. We thus have to face reality as we discus issues of Gacaca and capital punishment.
The pros and cons of capital punishment
The origin/ history of capital punishment against different background can be traced so many years with the famous system popularly known as Lynching.According to Waekpedia encyclopedia, Lynching is a term loosely applied to various forms of violence, usually murder, conceived by its perpetrators as extra-legal punishment of offenders by a summary procedure, ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law, notably execution, or used as a terrorist method of enforcing social domination. Victims of lynching have generally been members of groups marginalized or vilified by society. The practice is age-old, e.g. stoning is believed to have started thus before lapidation was adopted as a judicial form of execution.
Lynch law is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts, where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to enforce law and preserve order. The practice has been common in periods of threatened anarchy. In early twentieth century it was also found significantly in Russia and south-eastern Europe, but essentially and almost peculiarly in America.
The word "lynching" is recorded in English since 1835, as a verb derived from the earlier expression Lynch law (known since 1811), which clearly seems named after the Lynch family, whose surname derives either from Old English hlinc "hill" or from Irish Loingseach "sailor", though which member remains disputed.
The most likely eponym for the concept of Lynch law as summary justice is William Lynch, the author of "Lynch's Law", an agreement with the Virginia Legislature on September 22, 1782, which allowed Lynch to pursue and punish criminals in Pittsylvania County, without due process of law, because legal proceedings were in practical terms impossible in the area due to the lack of adequate provision of courts.The term Lynch mob was for a group of private persons who collectively practice lynching is attested from 1838. Since the Reconstruction Period after the Secession in the United States, it came to mean, generally, the summary infliction of capital punishment. The further narrowing of the meaning to extralegal execution specifically by hanging is from the 20th century.
After the horrific crimes against humanity, the idea of punishment came into limelight in the Rwandan society. The challenge however has been to understand what punishment is or entails so that it is handled with efficiency and effectiveness. What is punishment in the first instance? There are different ways of defining punishment that tend to vary depending on the individual or individuals defining it.
Punishment involves the deliberate infliction of suffering on a supposed or actual offender for an offence such as a moral or legal transgression. Since punishment involves inflicting a pain or deprivation similar to that which the perpetuator of a crime inflicts on his victim, it has generally been agreed that punishment requires moral as well as legal and political justification. While philosophers almost all agree that punishment is at least sometimes justifiable, they offer various accounts of how it is to be justified as well as what the infliction of punishment is designed to protect - rights, personal autonomy and private property, a political constitution, or the democratic process, for instance. Utilitarians attempt to justify punishment in terms of the balance of good over evil produced and thus focus our attention on extrinsic or consequentialist considerations. Retributivists attempt a justification that links punishment to moral wrongdoing, generally justifying t he practice on the grounds that it gives to wrongdoers what they deserve; their focus is thus on the intrinsic wrongness of crime that thereby merits punishment. "Compromise" theorists attempt to combine these two types of theories in a way that retains their perceived strengths while overcoming their perceived weaknesses. After discussing the various attempts at justification, utilitarian and retributive approaches to determining the amount of punishment will be examined. The worst contrive concerns capital punishment and perhaps the strongest argument in favour of capital punishment was made by Professor Immanuel Kant when he proclaimed that punishment inflicted on the guilty should be equal to the wrong done) Capital punishment is mandatory for murder. His retributive theory of punishment leaves execution of the murderer the only option for the crime of killing another person. That is, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, for the pointer of the scales of Justice to stand in balance. Kant's views are in defence of capital punishment and are based on punishing the guilty in equal proportion to the crime. To most people who hold similar views, capital punishment serves an additional purpose of being a future deterrent to similar crimes. However, it is debatable if this view is completely valid.
"Death penalty advocates punishment under the principle of lex talionis, or "an eye for an eye" -- the belief that punishment should fit the crime. In particular, people who favour capital punishment argue that murderers should be executed in retribution for their crimes and that such retribution serves justice for murder victims and their survivors".
Edward Koch once said: "how can murder be taken seriously if the penalty isn't equally as serious? A crime, after all, is only as severe as the punishment that follows it. It is by exacting the highest penalty for the taking of human life that we affirm the highest value of human life"
International standards of human rights call for either the abolition of the death penalty or, at a minimum, its use in only extremely limited cases. In April 1999, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution calling on all States "to establish a moratorium on executions, with a view to completely abolishing the death penalty."The Commission on Human Rights has also urged States "not to impose the death penalty for any but the most serious crimes" and "progressively to restrict the number of offences for which the death penalty may be imposed".
It was understandable thus that after the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, the immediate answer chose by the obvious angry people was capital punishment. They were there partly guided by emotions and since they are cooling can now be guided by a lot of wisdom. This wisdom should tell the futility of capital punishment. The summary execution of a terrible criminal, a monster, is actually a favour. He or she needs more than that. Capital punishment in Rwanda therefore, is a euphemism for legally murdering a person. Criminals can be, and are, executed because capital punishment is a legal institution in Rwanda. But the debatable issue is whether it is serving the purpose it is supposed to be serving.
Capital punishment remains to be a world wide controversial issue. It is true that all forms of punishment are subject to human fallibility, but capital punishment really exacerbates the controversy. Many survivors of genocide and in retributivists have continued to advocate for capital punishment especially in answering strong crimes like mass massacres and genocide. This is under the belief that an equal response to the crime committed must be meted. In other words according to them there must be justice consonant with the atrocious acts is what people normally call for.
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, very many victims were tortured to death. Their preys were so cruel that in most cases they had to slowly barter the victim's heads and other parts of the body before finishing them. "This kind of cruelty has thus to be answered with an equal punishment", remarked a survivor. But the question remains standing; can we be able to administer similar torture in capital punishment? The answer is definitely no and hence the capital punishment we advocate for does not serve the purpose. We are deterred by our moral restraints to committee similar atrocities in giving capital punishment. If for example, we are punishing a "monster" who killed by chopping parts of human bodies, we are supposed to chop him or her in capital punishment.
Take the example where the first people charged of genocide were killed by firing squad. They may have fired a hundred bullets in their heads but takes only one bullet in the head to kill. In this case we do not see any equality in terms of offence and punishment as advocated by retrutivists who are the best advocates of capital punishment. The Hamurabi's "eye for an eye and a tit for a tit", does not come in and hence rendering capital punishment futile.
To be continued
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2006 The New Times.
The New Times (Kigali)
OPINION
September 5, 2006
Posted to the web September 6, 2006
By Rwembeho Stephen
Kigali
Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they are right. The dead of the Rwandans accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of "Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the peace of Philip Gourevitch's book"; we wish to inform you... This makes the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda unique from other genocides.
It is this unspeakable crime against human that calls for punishment and the possibility of uniting a moral, economic and political shattered society of Rwanda. We thus have to face reality as we discus issues of Gacaca and capital punishment.
The pros and cons of capital punishment
The origin/ history of capital punishment against different background can be traced so many years with the famous system popularly known as Lynching.According to Waekpedia encyclopedia, Lynching is a term loosely applied to various forms of violence, usually murder, conceived by its perpetrators as extra-legal punishment of offenders by a summary procedure, ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law, notably execution, or used as a terrorist method of enforcing social domination. Victims of lynching have generally been members of groups marginalized or vilified by society. The practice is age-old, e.g. stoning is believed to have started thus before lapidation was adopted as a judicial form of execution.
Lynch law is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts, where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to enforce law and preserve order. The practice has been common in periods of threatened anarchy. In early twentieth century it was also found significantly in Russia and south-eastern Europe, but essentially and almost peculiarly in America.
The word "lynching" is recorded in English since 1835, as a verb derived from the earlier expression Lynch law (known since 1811), which clearly seems named after the Lynch family, whose surname derives either from Old English hlinc "hill" or from Irish Loingseach "sailor", though which member remains disputed.
The most likely eponym for the concept of Lynch law as summary justice is William Lynch, the author of "Lynch's Law", an agreement with the Virginia Legislature on September 22, 1782, which allowed Lynch to pursue and punish criminals in Pittsylvania County, without due process of law, because legal proceedings were in practical terms impossible in the area due to the lack of adequate provision of courts.The term Lynch mob was for a group of private persons who collectively practice lynching is attested from 1838. Since the Reconstruction Period after the Secession in the United States, it came to mean, generally, the summary infliction of capital punishment. The further narrowing of the meaning to extralegal execution specifically by hanging is from the 20th century.
After the horrific crimes against humanity, the idea of punishment came into limelight in the Rwandan society. The challenge however has been to understand what punishment is or entails so that it is handled with efficiency and effectiveness. What is punishment in the first instance? There are different ways of defining punishment that tend to vary depending on the individual or individuals defining it.
Punishment involves the deliberate infliction of suffering on a supposed or actual offender for an offence such as a moral or legal transgression. Since punishment involves inflicting a pain or deprivation similar to that which the perpetuator of a crime inflicts on his victim, it has generally been agreed that punishment requires moral as well as legal and political justification. While philosophers almost all agree that punishment is at least sometimes justifiable, they offer various accounts of how it is to be justified as well as what the infliction of punishment is designed to protect - rights, personal autonomy and private property, a political constitution, or the democratic process, for instance. Utilitarians attempt to justify punishment in terms of the balance of good over evil produced and thus focus our attention on extrinsic or consequentialist considerations. Retributivists attempt a justification that links punishment to moral wrongdoing, generally justifying t he practice on the grounds that it gives to wrongdoers what they deserve; their focus is thus on the intrinsic wrongness of crime that thereby merits punishment. "Compromise" theorists attempt to combine these two types of theories in a way that retains their perceived strengths while overcoming their perceived weaknesses. After discussing the various attempts at justification, utilitarian and retributive approaches to determining the amount of punishment will be examined. The worst contrive concerns capital punishment and perhaps the strongest argument in favour of capital punishment was made by Professor Immanuel Kant when he proclaimed that punishment inflicted on the guilty should be equal to the wrong done) Capital punishment is mandatory for murder. His retributive theory of punishment leaves execution of the murderer the only option for the crime of killing another person. That is, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, for the pointer of the scales of Justice to stand in balance. Kant's views are in defence of capital punishment and are based on punishing the guilty in equal proportion to the crime. To most people who hold similar views, capital punishment serves an additional purpose of being a future deterrent to similar crimes. However, it is debatable if this view is completely valid.
"Death penalty advocates punishment under the principle of lex talionis, or "an eye for an eye" -- the belief that punishment should fit the crime. In particular, people who favour capital punishment argue that murderers should be executed in retribution for their crimes and that such retribution serves justice for murder victims and their survivors".
Edward Koch once said: "how can murder be taken seriously if the penalty isn't equally as serious? A crime, after all, is only as severe as the punishment that follows it. It is by exacting the highest penalty for the taking of human life that we affirm the highest value of human life"
International standards of human rights call for either the abolition of the death penalty or, at a minimum, its use in only extremely limited cases. In April 1999, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution calling on all States "to establish a moratorium on executions, with a view to completely abolishing the death penalty."The Commission on Human Rights has also urged States "not to impose the death penalty for any but the most serious crimes" and "progressively to restrict the number of offences for which the death penalty may be imposed".
It was understandable thus that after the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, the immediate answer chose by the obvious angry people was capital punishment. They were there partly guided by emotions and since they are cooling can now be guided by a lot of wisdom. This wisdom should tell the futility of capital punishment. The summary execution of a terrible criminal, a monster, is actually a favour. He or she needs more than that. Capital punishment in Rwanda therefore, is a euphemism for legally murdering a person. Criminals can be, and are, executed because capital punishment is a legal institution in Rwanda. But the debatable issue is whether it is serving the purpose it is supposed to be serving.
Capital punishment remains to be a world wide controversial issue. It is true that all forms of punishment are subject to human fallibility, but capital punishment really exacerbates the controversy. Many survivors of genocide and in retributivists have continued to advocate for capital punishment especially in answering strong crimes like mass massacres and genocide. This is under the belief that an equal response to the crime committed must be meted. In other words according to them there must be justice consonant with the atrocious acts is what people normally call for.
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, very many victims were tortured to death. Their preys were so cruel that in most cases they had to slowly barter the victim's heads and other parts of the body before finishing them. "This kind of cruelty has thus to be answered with an equal punishment", remarked a survivor. But the question remains standing; can we be able to administer similar torture in capital punishment? The answer is definitely no and hence the capital punishment we advocate for does not serve the purpose. We are deterred by our moral restraints to committee similar atrocities in giving capital punishment. If for example, we are punishing a "monster" who killed by chopping parts of human bodies, we are supposed to chop him or her in capital punishment.
Take the example where the first people charged of genocide were killed by firing squad. They may have fired a hundred bullets in their heads but takes only one bullet in the head to kill. In this case we do not see any equality in terms of offence and punishment as advocated by retrutivists who are the best advocates of capital punishment. The Hamurabi's "eye for an eye and a tit for a tit", does not come in and hence rendering capital punishment futile.
To be continued
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2006 The New Times.