Christian PerspectiveBevis Byfield, Contributor
Ideas about what crimes should be punished by death have differed from society to society and from age to age. The difference in ideas is also reflected in what penalty should be inflicted. Criminals have been burned, hanged, thrown to beasts to be eaten, crucified, and stoned, beheaded and even dismembered and electrocuted.
Among ancient civilisations like Rome and Greece, capital punishment was the resultant consequence of what contemporary societies would describe as minor offences. The Code of Hammurabi reminds us that the death penalty was prescribed for malpractices related to the selling of beer, for accidentally sitting on the King's throne by Persian law, for idolatry in ancient Hebrew societies, in the days of Pericles, for sacrilege by Greek law and for stealing the keys of one's husband's wine cellar by the laws of the early Roman Republics.
This very brief statistical overview reminds us that the methodology for inflicting the death penalty for crimes committed was dominated by diversity with the distinctive mark of barbarity. For example, in Ancient Persia the condemned criminal was put on a boat with another boat over him. He was forcibly fed with milk and honey in abundance with amounts plastered over his face. Unprotected from the sun he would be eventually devoured by insects.
Since the 19th century the barbarity and the public nature of the executions have been generally debarred from the practice of capital punishment in most countries. The debate concerning the morality of capital punishment has therefore dominated the media houses since the second half of the 19th century. Why?
Proponents and opponents of capital punishment have debated the issue in terms of deterrent, retributive, economic and social effectiveness. In our Jamaican society one has to face seriously the question -- although capital punishment is still prescribed by law as the consequences for perpetrators of murder, there is no hard evidence to demonstrate a correlation between murders and the death penalty reducing the numbers of such murders. More and more one has come to believe that it is the general public which feels that only the execution of the criminal will satisfy the said public.
Further, the long delay between the committing of the offence and the final decision with respect to guilt, introduces elements of injustice with respect to the accused. For the public to be convinced that justice was not only done, but also appeared to have been done, reform of the legal system desperately needs to be done. The very fact that human rights organisations have been questioning the justice system, the very fact that there are tremendous differences of opinion concerning whether or not the British court system should have a say in the matter has kept the debate alive.
Any fear of the death penalty is greatly reduced by the diminishing numbers of countries resorting to it, uncertainties with respect to detection, drawn-out court procedures, the hesitancy of juries to convict when the penalty is still on the books, fewer executions, and the non-public nature of the executions. More and more people in societies have become more and more humanitarian in outlook and therefore have as a consequence driven a nail into the coffin of capital punishment as a means of decreasing the number of murders in society.
Rev. B. Byfield is a Minister of the United Church in Jamaica & the Cayman Islands and a Lecturer of the United Theological College of the West Indies.
