Dawn Ritch
ABOUT THE only thing I've changed my mind on over the course of a lifetime is the death penalty. As late as the 1990s anybody who opposed the death penalty was a bleeding-heart liberal. A touchy-feely person getting in the way of justice. I've changed my mind completely. The advent of DNA evidence makes a nonsense of a conveyor belt of people to the gallows. And a justice system in Jamaica where people can languish in jails for decades, their cases never heard, and probably a wrongful arrest, their files lost in the courts... who can condemn a man to death on the basis of such judicial miasma? Police that stand accused locally and internationally of extra-judicial killings. Evidence that is planted and in other cases manufactured, bribes paid... who could sit on a jury and in all conscience vote for the death of the defendant? And if justice is not the answer, and only economics, then perhaps the cost of maintaining convicted murderers for a lifetime in properly secured prisons is the only reasonable sanction against a state which operates a ramshackle judicial system. And the continued burden to taxpayers a reasonable expense for a people who routinely acquiesce whenever things are swept under the carpet.
This criticism does not apply to 'Jamaicans for Justice', which Jamaican Attorney-General A.J. Nicholson recently described at a Kiwanis luncheon as having 'a Eurocentric view of justice'. His arms waving round and round in circles on television, he praised America for having the death penalty, and said it required a two-thirds majority of both Houses in Parliament to change our Constitution in order to ensure that it is not abolished here. He praised Barbados for being the only Caribbean territory to have done the latter.
All over America people are being executed by the state for murders they didn't commit, according to later DNA evidence. DNA evidence has freed still others on death row. The death penalty today is as abhorrent to me as the idea of cannibalism in primitive societies. Civilisation demands at the very least the protection of human beings from arbitrary execution and murder.
DEATH PENALTY
I do not respect the authority of the state apparatus to decide upon such an issue. Particularly when the death penalty is still on our books, yet the state has executed nobody on death row since the late 1980s. And mobs form in the blink of an eye in both urban and rural Jamaica to beat or chop a man to death caught in the act of stealing or worse. This is a toxic environment in which the rule of law has been abandoned from top to bottom. In these circumstances a jury of one's peers becomes not people of conscience able to exercise it, but an aberrant machine programmed to wash the dirty laundry of a society that has spun out of control. This is not justice, it is a travesty of justice. This same Attorney-General said on radio that he knew nothing about the state of emergency when it was imposed, and then later said he had indeed advised the Government on it as was his duty. Which statement is true? Because one of them is a lie. If the Attorney-General lies to the public, what then can possibly be the point of believing a word from the justice system? Nicholson thinks he can tarnish the idea of abolishing the death sentence by implying that only white people could think of doing a thing like that.
Perhaps the model he recommends we follow is that of America, where by far and away black people are the majority in U.S. jails and on death row. Whose side is Nicholson on anyway? Because it can't be ours at any level, whether rational or irrational.
Murders plague the country on every street. Without a state of war or an acknowledged armed insurgence we exceed the murder rate of all other countries in the world. Countries that have abolished the death penalty experience nothing like the horror we have here. Nor would they dream of bringing it back to satisfy the hysteria of any public official overwhelmed by his job. It should be abolished in Jamaica, too. Not only because it is arbitrary, but because the last 15 years suggest that this, of all Jamaican governments, should not be allowed to apply it. For the first time in our history a Jamaican Government is listed among the most corrupt and least transparent anywhere.
HUGELY UNPLEASANT
I object to the death penalty not only because it is hugely unpleasant, but because the Government would use it as just another carpet under which to sweep its failures. It is confident that the hangman is a popular figure in Jamaica, and there may be political advantage to letting him dust off his ropes. This is a Government which has enacted almost more legislation than all others combined. They've never heard of a law they didn't want to make, nor seen one they didn't want to change. And all this while the country sinks deeper and deeper into public disorder and corruption. Any recommendation for new legislation or constitutional changes from such an administration must therefore be treated with the contempt it deserves. Not least because they've shown no inclination to uphold any of the laws that already exist.
