Is death the answer?
A few weeks ago, I watched a late-night movie, and it has left me wondering about the death penalty ever since. It was about a man who was accused of murder. Throughout the trial, the man vehemently denied the charge. At the end of the trial, his protestations notwithstanding, he was found guilty of the crime and convicted to face death penalty.
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As is in most murder trials, the convict was given the opportunity to appeal against his conviction, which he did without success. Exactly two years after his conviction, he was brought out from condemned cells to face execution.
He continued to plead his innocence, amid sobbing, till he was sent to the gallows and hanged. Even when they covered his head with the hood and put the rope around his neck, he continued to make an inaudible noise and broke into a Christmas hymn: "Silent night, holy night, All is calm.....", when snap! The signal was given and the man fell into the dungeon below, dangling at the end of the thick rope.
There was a convulsive movement of the body. Then everything was quiet. It was an emotional scene. This was a movie but it could depict a real life situation and it left me sleepless for some time.
On March 13, 2014 or so, we read that a man, Glenn Ford, who was on death row for 25 years in the state of Louisiana in the United States (US) had been set free.
Ford, a black, was found guilty by an all-white jury for killing a white man called Isadore Rozeman, who was described as his part-time employer. Ford denied the charge but he was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988.
A district judge overturned the conviction and sentence "because of new information that supported Ford's claim that he was not present or involved in the death of Rozeman."
Mr Glenn Ford has lost 25 years of his active years on a death row, which is not a pleasant experience anybody should go through. It has its own traumatic effects and could have caused his death long ago.
Even though in Ford's case the state will give him a monetary compensation for wrongful incarceration, spending those 25 long years waiting for death for a crime not committed, leaves you with an emotional and psychological scar that may never go away.
The worst could have happened. Mr Ford would have been executed if the new information which helped to overturn his conviction had not been made available to the court. In other words, an innocent man would have lost his life because of a wrong conviction.
Mr Ford may be among the few convicts who escaped the hangman's noose because of fresh evidence in later years. Many others might not have been so lucky. Incidentally, death is an irreversible act and no amount of sweet words of regret or material compensation would restore a life so lost.
Apart from mistakes associated with murder trials, should death be considered as a punishment? Aren't all mortals going to die? In most cultures and religions, death is seen as a means to transit into another realm of life. So why reduce this means to a punishment?
If punishment is to restore the humanness in a criminal and make him a reformed person, then death as the ultimate punishment has no room for reformation.
If it is to inflict pain, then its transient nature means death inflicts the pain more on relatives and friends alive than the dead. If it is for deterrence, then the evidence does not support the facts on the ground. Apart from isolated cases in which people were inadvertently drawn into crime, many of those who commit heinous crimes are very much aware of the consequences but still go ahead to indulge in those crimes. Obviously, they do not care.
Long-term incarceration, with its mental and psychological agony, will serve both as reformatory and a deterrence. Who knows, it will give room for the innocent to be set free, should fresh evidence later prove that they were wrongly accused. The death penalty does not offer that respite.
We have our own case here of Mr Agyare, who spent 14 years in custody after he was maliciously implicated in armed robbery. The police never bothered to investigate the case thoroughly to bring the suspect to court.
The police could still have gone ahead to prefer charges against him based on fabricated evidence and get Agyare convicted for armed robbery, which carries the death penalty.
Like the case of Mr Ford of the US, Agyare lived long enough to hear a confession of his accuser, which enabled him to set in motion a legal battle to regain his freedom. It would have been an innocent life lost if, based on that malicious accusation, Agyare had been convicted and executed for armed robbery, a crime he never committed.
In the Bible, we read that God was willing to spare the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if he could get one innocent person. Even in common law, it is better to spare a criminal than to sacrifice an innocent person in the name of criminal justice. That clearly demonstrates the value of innocence and how it should be protected.
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