The death sentence is an instrument of terror
IN SOUTH Africa it was used by the apartheid regime to terrorise our people. Therefore, the first judgment of our Constitutional Court declared capital punishment to be invalid; prohibited as cruel and unusual punishment which the government could not justify in the absence of proof that it was a materially more effective deterrent than life imprisonment.
It violated everyone’s unqualified right to life, was irredeemable in effect, and arbitrary in enforcement - being dependent on race, poverty and ignorance.
It annihilated human dignity, the other most important of all rights in our value system, and the source of all human rights.
Nevertheless, several states – some of whom we entwine ourselves with politically, economically, and culturally – scorn our values.
Amnesty International’s latest report estimates that China carried out thousands of executions in 2019, more than any other country.
Excluding China – during 2020 Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq accounted for more than 88% of reported executions world-wide.
Iran executed 246 persons, increasingly using the death penalty as a weapon of political repression against dissidents, protesters and members of ethnic minorities.
During October and November alone, Egypt executed 57 people in a government crackdown on civil society. During 2019, 25 were executed in the US.
For the eleventh year, it was the only country in the Americas to do so.
Under the Trump regime, the physical
barbarity of implementing a death penalty was fully exposed; and too the hypocrisy of trying to do so in accordance with the rule of law in a so-called “democracy”.
The federal death penalty had been reinstated in 1988 but executions in the US remained rare.
Some states put convicts to death. A growing number abolished the death penalty or banned the practice.
Trump’s administration resumed federal executions after a 17-year gap, pointedly ignoring Joe Biden’s revelation that 160 individuals who had been sentenced to death in the US since 1973 were later exonerated. The administration trampled over an array of legal and practical barriers.
Executions were carried out in the middle of the night. One prisoner was left strapped to the execution stretcher while state lawyers went to court to remove a court order preventing his execution.
Another prisoner was executed while his appeal was still pending.
The prison department bought its lethal injection drugs from a secret (black market) pharmacy that failed a quality test.
Private executioners were hired and paid in cash. During the flurry of executions carried out in Trump’s last days in office, people on death row were often unable to access in person legal representatives due to the pandemic.
But it was not just his encouragement and refusal to commute sentences that brought about this state of affairs. It depended on the judgment of conservative Supreme Court justices, some of whom Trump had appointed to endorse the government’s method of execution, pentobarbital injection.
This causes the lungs to fill with bloody frothy fluid. According to medical experts, prisoners would perceive this while choking to death and drowning in their own lung secretions.
The justices relied on a proposition by a discredited anaesthetist, that the prisoner would eventually become unconscious – but only after about
30 seconds – and should not suffer after that. On both versions, injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits this.
The Supreme Court had previously held that this term draws its meaning from evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.
Nevertheless, Justice Gorsuch held that execution by injection is unexceptional; because the court had never found a constitutional problem with “traditional acceptable methods such as hanging, electrocution and firing squad”. So the killing spree continues.
This judgment is an indictment of the decency of American society.
On the 27th anniversary of our democracy, we should acknowledge the Constitutional Court for holding South Africans to decent values.