There are no final solutions

India remains firmly on the list of 90 countries that still retain capital punishment

It was to be expected that the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the man guilty of the Oklahoma city bombing which killed 168 people in 1995, would spark off a familiar bout of soul searching over capital punishment in the US. Worldwide though opposition has been growing to this controversial form of justice. Since World War II limitations placed on the use of the death penalty have been increasing steadily. Amnesty International estimates that an average of three countries have been joining the ranks of the abolitionists every year just over the last decade. Seventy five countries, including Australia, Cambodia, Canada, France, Germany, East Timor, Greece, Mauritius, Nepal, South Africa and the UK, have abolished the death penalty altogether. Fourteen countries (Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Mexico, etc) apply it only for very extraordinary crimes (crimes under military law or exceptional cases) and twenty are abolitionist in practice: Bhutan, Brunei, Gambia, Maldives, Sri Lanka and others.

In December 2000 opponents of the death penalty presented the United Nations with a petition signed by 3.2 million signatories from 146 countries, including the Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury and writer Umberto Eco. Last year Italy highlighted its opposition to the practice by flooding the Colosseum with light for 48 hours every time a death penalty was suspended or commuted or a country banned capital punishment. Even in countries where capital punishment is provided for, public support for it has been decreasing. In Taiwan support is reportedly down from over 70 per cent a few years ago. Vietnam’s most prominent Buddhist dissident called on it to ‘‘follow the example of civilised nations and abolish capital punishment altogether’’. And even in the US, the most prominent votary of the ‘‘eye for an eye’’ principle, the size of public support appears to be shrinking (65 per cent from 80 per cent in 1994).

India remains firmly on the list of about 90 countries that still retain capital punishment, a list that includes nations like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. For an issue that has been the subject of so much rethinking all over the globe — from the introduction of more humane methods of execution to privacy to total abolition — there has been surprisingly little public debate here in recent times. Last July a national campaign against the death penalty was launched by a conglomeration of jurists and human rights campaigners, headed by
former Supreme Court Justice Krishna Iyer, who met in New Delhi and called for a moratorium on the death penalty for ten years followed by abolition. Would there be popular support for the move? In a recent television discussion, when a journalist in the audience posed the question of a ban on capital punishment in India, following the debate over Timothy McVeigh, all three politicians from separate parties on the panel vigorously opposed a ban, maintaining that the death penalty was necessary; 70 per cent of the audience agreed with them.

The arguments put forward were the same ones that have been quoted for years by supporters of the death penalty: deterrence and retribution. Both are highly emotive issues. The first appears to be based on perception rather than fact: there is little evidence in the public arena to show that capital punishment has actually acted as a deterrent or to prove that its abolition would give an impetus to crime.

The second is a more subjective matter. Justice to the victim or at least to the victim’s near and dear ones is at the core of it. In the McVeigh case there was a man who having lost his daughter, a human rights activist in the Oklahoma bombing, campaigned against McVeigh’s execution and helped other relatives who were similarly seeking to come to terms with their loss. There were others, however, who made it a point to attend the execution and expressed feelings of calm and vindication following the event. Whether retribution should be the motive of a legal proceeding is of course a moot point. As a letter writer said in the New York Times: ‘‘All we have achieved through Mr. McVeigh’s execution is the fulfillment of his desire. Killing is wrong, whether by explosives or by lethal injection.’’

But perhaps the most powerful arguments against capital punishment are to be found in literature, in recent books on the subject. Bestselling author John Grisham’s The Chamber is a compelling and disturbing narration of an aging convict’s agonising wait for the gas chamber. And in Shashi Warrier’s Hangman’s Journal, the words of the hangman who has killed more than a hundred convicts for the state offer thought for reflection to a society committed to legal execution: ‘‘Killing a man is like closing a door for ever, and when you do it you lose a part of yourself for ever.’’

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