These past few weeks I could not help but notice that the courts have been sentencing more people to death. For this year, at least six have been given the death sentence and as far as the people in the society are concerned the sentence represents justice.
I happened to note the excuse offered by three boys who claimed that a man forced them to kill a woman. I asked myself whether this could have been possible but I then convinced myself that these days with less and less people seeking to improve their intelligence—in short we are fast becoming a nation of fools and idiots— all things are possible.
When the judge handed down the sentence, I looked at the three young men, and I failed to notice any sign of remorse. It was as if the judge had just ordered them to enjoy a trip to Kaieteur Falls . They appeared calm and as they were being led away to the place where condemned people are kept, they chatted among themselves, perhaps recapping the killing and talking about what could have been done to avoid capture.
Perhaps they were then apportioning blame to the other. I would never know because I doubt that I would ever get a chance to talk with them and then again, I doubt that they would ever share their private experience with an outsider like me.
This past week, another judge handed down the death penalty to a man who killed his wife. This one was most interesting because the man claimed that the stabbing was an accident. He had stabbed his wife and indeed a stabbing could be accidental; but when the victim is stabbed eleven times, then I fail to see how that could have been accidental.
Perhaps he meant to stab her 22 times and that it was by accident that he failed to reach that quota.
But even before these men were ordered to spend their days contemplating their past and to prepare for the future, there was another killer. This one took advantage of a woman of unsound mind.
He had to be a bully and from the evidence led in court, he was pre-occupied with having sex with this woman because he took her away from some people, had his way with her and continued to do so until something snapped in his head and he killed her.
I could only surmise that in one moment of lucidity the woman must have objected to the repeated sexual attack and must have done something to offend him.
So we have the death penalty, but from all appearances it appears that the penalty is only on the statutes. We have not sent anyone to the gallows since 1995. I recalled the time when the state read the death warrant to two men for the third time but again there were people who stepped forward to halt the execution. They filed a constitutional motion and ever since they have succeeded to halt all executions.
At the same time, we have the international community arguing that a lengthy period on death row constitutes cruel and inhuman. Indeed, having someone cooped up in a cell wondering when his number would be called is most distressing for the person awaiting execution.
But I argue that when that person was performing his dastardly act, the international community was nowhere around to determine that his action was most cruel and inhuman.
Two Caribbean countries that still have appeals to the Privy Council as their final approach are trying desperately to rid themselves of what they call a shackle. They want to execute their criminals but they claim that they are being stymied.
I still remember the days when the international community shouted to the then Prime Minister of the country called Rhodesia , now Zimbabwe , to refrain from hanging some people.
That Prime Minister, Ian Smith, merely thumbed his nose at the international community and did what he had to do. He felt deep within his heart that he needed to execute people he considered inimical to the interest of his government and he did.
Certainly we are not as brave or determined because we depend on the international community for our very survival. We need the money, the food, the clothes, just about everything. We are the beggars and as the saying goes, beggars cannot be choosers.
We also listen to those who say that the death penalty is not a deterrent. Well someone once said that if it isn't, at least it ensures that one killer would not live to kill again.
I believe that the death penalty is a deterrent. When criminals forced their way into people's homes, robbed and sometimes killed them, the society saw a new feature in home construction. People began to live in their self-made prisons with grills and bars.
To his credit, Desmond Hoyte decided that the nonsense had to come to an end and he set about hanging all those who breached the sanctity of people's homes and killed them. Almost immediately that type of crime ended and to this day we hardly hear of such things.
This is not to say that people do not enter the homes of others for nefarious purposes but then again, once there was hanging, the crime that became known as ‘kick down the door' ended.
We are seeing an upsurge in killings once more and some of them are so brutal that we in the media do not dare to present a graphic description. People would dislike us. It is as though they prefer to live in a world of their own in which all is well and beautiful.
I have seen people walking with guns although they are not licenced to carry them and I know of people who do not hesitate to use them. The reason for this behaviour is that there is no condign sanction. As a consequence, human life has diminished in value.
I know of people who spoke to the president about releasing people from Death Row simply because in their view, the person has suffered enough. Poppycock.
A famous American writer, Truman Capote, was one of those. He wrote an excellent book, ‘In Cold Blood' that recorded some chilling murders. He spoke with the killers, among them a boy who killed his parents.
In one chapter he recalled that one fellow said, “Imagine among the five of us we have killed 13 people”.
Capote thought that he was doing good when he persuaded the authorities to release one of the killers to his care. The man promptly killed again.
In the coming days and weeks we are going to see more murders. The pressures of having to live under the increasingly difficult economic conditions are going to ‘make people lose faith'.
I insist that unless we make some people walk that short distance to the gallows, people who lose faith will not look over their shoulder when they allow their passion to flow to the extreme.
Take the case of the man who blasted a fellow farmer. None can tell me that he hesitated and, had the dead farmer's son not escaped, we would have never heard of the story in such chilling detail. The state must save us from such people.