An online friend opened up a small discussion about capital punishment for terrorists and other hardened criminals and there was a flurry of comments exchanged as a result. I wanted to keep a repo of it somewhere — what’s better than an online journal.
It wasn’t exactly capital punishment that we began with. She was specifically talking about writers and human rights activists who stand up against judicial executions.
These are some thoughts on the whole deal.
A. Same conclusions but a different approach. While I’d like to share the sentiments of human rights activists, I’ve noticed that the only thing I agree with is the conclusion: no capital punishment. The reasons that I come to this conclusion from are totally different to that of the activists.
B. Quick-fixes don’t help in the long run. Capital punishment is the Western-style, quick-fix solution at all times. Between India and the U.S, the latter leads in the number of cases where a criminal is executed. We have the “rarest of the rare” clause that keeps judges away from writing a death sentence frequently.
Capital punishment does not serve to make a society better in anyway. The only thing it does is getting rid of criminals faster. The real issue with every generation of a civilized society is the number of criminals it produces. We have to have a negative growth rate in this regard. If Generation One has 20% of its population as criminals, Generation Two that follows One must have less than 20% ideally (this, even at the cost of exploding population growth). To this effect, capital punishment doesn’t help.
C. Justice, not revenge. The whole idea of executing a criminal, if the argument is “we can’t let them just be. They have killed people”, is based on revenge. I don’t think revenge of such extremities has any place in a society that wants to call itself civilized or progressive.
D. Emotions have their place. Most importantly, killing a criminal does nothing to the people who have been affected. Closure is an emotional aspect and if we run countries and governments and civic bodies on emotions, we are seriously doing something wrong. Emotions have their place in our life but they should be moderated. Killing a criminal also gets rid of a person who can be condemned to productive work for the rest of his/her life in exchange for food, minimal clothing and prison-like shelter and nothing else.
E. Wasting a human resource. The fact that criminals can be used for labour is not new. To think that everytime a criminal who is given (only a) life-term instead of being hanged is actually being given a free-rein is wrong. A person condemned to a prison and hard labour for the rest of his/her life has been punished enough. (On that note, an aside: life-terms in some cases should be truly life. Not 3 decades). Snatching away the freedom of a person is punishment enough in this day and age. Instead of throwing away a person to the gallows, we must learn to utilize them for the collective benefit of the society. We Indians are prone to squeeze the heck out of toothpaste tube — why are we so liberal in wasting about 20-30 years of productive labour?
F. The counter-intuitive thing about deterrance and death penalty. Punishment via life-term and hard labour is more inclined towards a corrective system that befits a progressive society than judicial execution. And it works better as a deterrent (although it’s an unpopular opinion).
If death was the only deterrent, there are two problems.
One: Terrorists — the suicide squad kind — are not afraid of it. They have already been trained for it and in fact they are willingly walking into the gates of death. To speak of death penalty as a deterrance here is laughable.
Two: History has kind of proved that the death penalty has not really cured our system. Instilling fear has helped only so much. There have been regions in the world that had instilled fear in its citizenry much more than some of the Middle East countries do these days. The fate of all these regions has been almost similar: they disintegrate and collapse totally. Fear (of death, specifically) is a poor performer in changing our immoral/illegal/unethical ways.
A parole-less life-term (true life) snatches away your freedom to walk on a pleasant evening down the road or have a cup of tea in a shop. At first glance, this is not scarier than death. But in reality, this is the scariest thing. More than death. People would beg to be killed rather than put in a cell and commandeered to work without relief (in terms of freedom). And that is a far better deterrent than death (which in this case becomes a relief rather than a punishment).
We don’t want to grow into a vengeful society. We want to be a corrective society. Capital punishment has no place in that kind of a society.
Exceptions
As with every rule in life, there are exceptions to these ideas.
a. On the battle ground, criminals (terrorists included) need to be deactivated so that they don’t cause further harm to people. If this can only be achieved by killing them, we have no other choice. Self-preservation > human rights on the battlefield. And battlefield also includes those moments of grave consequences (including domestic, civic and regional scenarios).
b. A physically- or mentally-incapable criminal, if deemed as unfit to be of any productive use, would be using (wasting) public resources. In that case, to put them down to sleep seems correct.