Capital punishment

A long, failed experiment

Thou shall not kill… and now, a list of exceptions that rolls out like credits at the end of a major film.

The state plays, or is unreasonably empowered to play, the role of the family patriarch in a nation-state model. Madiha Tahir and Mahvish Ahmed expertly point out the Roman Law, in which the patriarch is permitted to kill his own children, in an attempt to maintain order in the house; ‘honour killing’, so to speak. The premeditated killing of an inmate already made incapable of inflicting any more harm isn’t ‘justice’ as much as it is ‘honour killing’ at the level of the state.

Capital punishment is unlike other forms of killing like, say, defensive manslaughter where a wife accidentally kills her drunk husband in the process of protecting herself or her children from severe physical harm. Or an officer of the law inadvertently slaying an armed criminal in an attempt to save a group of hostages.

Capital punishment is the slaughter of formerly dangerous criminals in the authorities’ custody. ‘Formerly’, I say, because they are no longer a threat to anyone, except the paint on the walls of their prison cells that they may scratch their initials on. They may pose a threat to other prisoners, all deviants like them more or less, but it’s the authorities’ job to prevent violence inside prisons.

To make a premeditated decision of hanging such a person, to whom it may concern, is not strictly justice.

I empathise with Pakistani liberals’ uneasiness about discussing the virtues and vices, mostly vices, of the death penalty right after the execution of a man who killed a governor in religion’s name; and the announcement of death sentence to two brothers involved in an act of honour killing.

Note that when I say ‘liberals’, I acknowledge that they come in all shapes and sizes. I unapologetically regard myself as a liberal writer. I would rather not use tired conservative lingo like “pseudo-liberals” or “so-called liberals”, because a person falling anywhere on the sociopolitical spectrum left of the centre would be correct to classify himself as ‘liberal’. It is possible to be liberal on some issues, and centrist or even conservative on others.

In case of the liberals I mentioned earlier, they take a liberal stance on killing in the name of religion, while simultaneously touting a right-wing stance of using deadly force to “teach them a lesson”. Thou shall not kill, except when we really, really want a person dead because of what he did.

I have respect for the liberal argument that it is not rational to pardon religious fanatics when nobody else – including paraplegic prisoners in wheelchairs – seem to be spared. In this case, the argument isn’t about one’s approval or disapproval of the death penalty but simply that religious fanatics and those convicted for honour killing receive the same punishment that’s given to everyone else. After all, one would not want to set a precedent that killing in the name of religion or culture is a lesser crime, compared to killing in the name of essentially anything else.

That, however, does not explain on its own the atmosphere of jubilation within many liberal circles on 29^th February. There is absolutely no reason to celebrate someone’s death, unless it simultaneously allows the resurrection of the lives ripped away from us by the one now being sent to the gallows.

Among my circle of high-octane leftists — as opposed to younger, moderate liberals – there was a telling lack of triumphalism. Nods were exchanged, as there was genuine fear that justice would be denied, and Qadri may at some point be set free – or at least be allowed a padded, comfy jail sentence that other convicts in his position would never dream of. A legion of lawyers and overwhelming political support from right-wing radicals that openly tout extrajudicial murder as a reasonable solution to sacrilegious acts, were bent on this goal. In that sense, maybe it was some kind of half-victory for the seekers of justice.

Death penalty has long been used as hollow political gestures by governments around the world to remind their citizens that they’re “doing something” to fix a problem; like drug trade or terrorism. This is standard operating procedure. Grab a random convict and put him on the gallows, which saves us the need to address the complex official policies that are actually causing the problem. Many of the terrorists hanged after the APS attack, for instance, were people who had nothing to do with the APS attack itself, and had been captured for conspiring to assassinate Musharraf many years ago. Angry citizens got to unload their rage on something and move on, achieving virtually nothing.

Even worse: capital punishment is known by sociologists to confer a “brutalisation effect” on the society. It allows a population to become accustomed to the idea of premeditated killing for “good” reasons. This is in contrast to countries where death penalties are not awarded, and the population is made to believe that ‘killing’ is simply and utterly inconceivable. No exceptions. After all, you cannot terrorise a nation into civility. If you could, then ancient imperialist regimes that decorated their castle walls with the mutilated heads of slain enemies would’ve made model societies with lowest crime rates. It doesn’t work that way. In fact, we have enough data to prove that countries that have gotten rid of the death penalty have shown no increase in crime rate; at places, the opposite has occurred.

As for those who object to paying for the lifetime supply of food for incarcerated pedophiles, rapists, and murderers, what moral leg do they have to stand on? Death rows themselves can prove to be costly to the taxpayer – so much so that in developed countries they dwarf the cost of life imprisonment. But even if that isn’t true for countries like Pakistan, how many cases have we had in the past around the world where innocent citizens were falsely executed? Or had remained imprisoned for years before evidence of their innocence had shown up, especially through the availability of new technology? Perhaps these opponents argue that it’s fair to march an occasional innocent to the gallows, as long as our bloodthirst – stemming from a tragic confusion between ‘vengeance’ and ‘justice’ – is satiated by the execution of ‘legitimate’ criminals.

This is worth repeating. ‘Justice’ is not synonymous with ‘vengeance’. An “eye for an eye” system entails that we match the barbarian with equal barbarism of our own, and it’s tremendously difficult to sustain as the modern world keeps running out of justifications for capital punishment.