The Tribune

“IT is important to note that while we oppose the death penalty, we embrace the victims of violent crimes; those who are hurting and grieving for their loved ones who have been killed, at times in the most heinous ways.”

– Archbishop Patrick Pinder (2009 Red Mass Homily).

Frenzied, bloodthirsty calls for the resumption of capital punishment are a desperate expression of our collective and longstanding failure to respond coherently and imaginatively to our culture of death, violence, gangs, bloodlust, and cycles of revenge and retaliation.

Such calls are also signs of deep-seated frustration with the inadequacy of the political directorate and the criminal justice system in dealing more effectively with crime in general and murder in particular, including the vexing matter of bail for alleged murderers and the trying of capital offences in a timely manner.

Depressingly, this enthusiasm for state-imposed violence is being urged by some religious leaders, including Bahamas Christian Council President Bishop Delton Fernander who recently trotted out the misused and misunderstood eye for an eye theology.

In 2016, the Roman Catholic Bishops of the Antilles Episcopal Conference (AEC) issued a Statement on Capital Punishment during the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. The bishops urged:

“We stated in our Pastoral Letter, The Gift of Life (2008), that ‘Very often those who support capital punishment invoke the text, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ (the ‘lex talionis’ – Lev. 24:20).’

“This was, of course, a most important development in the Old Testament’s understanding of justice. Justice must not seek revenge. The punishment due from injustice must be rational and not excessive.

“However, the ‘lex talionis’ was not the last word on this matter. In fact, Jesus gave us the last word: ‘You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you: do not oppose evil with evil…’ (Mt. 5:38-39). Of course, Jesus became the best example of this teaching as he was an innocent man who became the victim of capital punishment.”

The website Christianity.com notes: “Many people wonder if the phrase, ‘life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise’ was applied literally.

“In Jewish Oral Tradition, called the Talmud and among Christian scholars, the consensus is no; this was not taken literally but instead used as a standard by judges to set the fine and appropriately punish the perpetrator for the harm he caused.”

The idea of the wrathful avenging God more often seems to hold our spiritual and religious imagination and that of fundamentalist preachers, rather than the merciful Christ of the New Testament who rescued the woman caught in adultery from being stoned to death by a mob of the self-righteous determined to impose on her a capital punishment.

One’s image and understanding of God affects one’s Christian anthropology, i.e., one’s image and understanding of the human person and the human community affects one’s understanding of sin and redemption, as well as one’s views on a range of ethical issues such as capital punishment.

We are a fundamentalist culture shackled, trapped by the psychology and theology of revenge and bloodletting. We are often unrelentingly harsh and unmerciful.

That we live in a culture where many believe that the ravages of a hurricane may be punishment from God, rather than a naturally occurring phenomenon, is representative of an antediluvian mindset in both senses of the word.

Certain punishments are a necessary component of fundamental justice. But retaliation is a different ethical species. Given the jurisdictions which retain capital punishment, The Bahamas is not in good company.

The late Paul Adderley, who served as Attorney General, argued to this columnist that his opposition to capital punishment was not for many of the so-called “moral” reasons as offered by some.

However, Adderley’s opposition, though argued on practical grounds, was also ethical. He was emphatic that the possibility of the state executing an innocent person rendered capital punishment unacceptable.

Adderley went even further. He noted that he personally knew of at least one case in which the state executed a man for a murder that he did not commit.

Former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham observed of the death penalty: “One of the horrors of capital punishment is that there is no remediation for a mistake. An innocent man executed because he was wrongly convicted remains dead even if a court of law subsequently determines that he was innocent.”

The list of such wrongful convictions and executions exist in just about every country in which capital punishment is practised. There remains concern over a number of possible mistaken executions in The Bahamas in the past several decades.

In criminal law there is a formulation usually attributed to English jurist William Blackstone, but which can also be traced back to Biblical precepts which admonish: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Some scholars of jurisprudence posit that the actual numbers (ratios) are not generally seen as important, so much as the idea that the state should not cause undue or mistaken harm “just in case”. So the state, and most particularly democratic states, act so that their courts “err on the side of innocence”.

State-sanctioned violence in the form of capital punishment reinforces a culture of violence, demeans the value of human life and serves no clear anti-crime purpose in terms of deterrence.

Countries that practice capital punishment do not necessarily record lower crime or murder rates than do countries that have abolished the death penalty.

To the contrary, many countries that abolished capital punishment have far fewer murders annually than do those that continue to execute convicted murderers; for example, the European Union countries versus the United States of America.

The arguments touted by many in The Bahamas for capital punishment seem more like a desire for revenge. The greater moral burden for proponents is the likely possibility of the state executing innocent people in our name. Such a possibility is unjust and neither humane nor Christian.

The bishops of the AEC pressed in their statement: “All recent international studies and research show that capital punishment does not act as a deterrent, nor does it foster respect for life in our communities.

“Hence, regardless of the potential unpopularity of our Gospel message that informs our position, we reaffirm the position: ‘Capital punishment symbolises a form of despair for the effective reform of persons.’

“The most important deterrent to criminal activity is not the threat of execution, but rather the risk of apprehension and conviction for the crime committed. Enforcement agencies and judicial processes that are most effective in exercising their authority provide the greatest deterrent to crime, even when the nature of the penalty is less severe.

“To call for the resumption of executions is to deflect attention away from true deterrents, and to ignore the reforms necessary for the instruments of civil justice to act as effective agencies for the prevention of social disorder.”

In our justifiable outrage at crime and our responsibility to punish those convicted of murder we need not indulge a similar level of brutality nor compromise our sense of justice and fairness by maintaining a system that is bound to make the grave error of killing an innocent person, an error that can never be rectified.

In 1996, attorney, activist and writer Marion Bethel wrote soulfully of her anguish after two executions in the country some years shy of the approaching new century.

Bethel raged: “There is no balm in the gallows, no quick fix to our problems. A brutally broken neck cannot be our highest response. A ravaged throat and a spilled tongue can no longer help to tell our story, give shape to our collective voice, sing the sad and hopeful songs of our vision.

“Our children will not forgive us for the quick fix of the gallows. They will despise our lack of creative possibilities, they will hate our legacy to them – a culture of destruction and death void of life-giving properties. What will they make of the gallows, the official State slaughterhouse?”

Like Bethel, the bishops urge a higher ethic of love and “creative possibilities”:

“As we stated in our Pastoral Letter on Capital Punishment (2000): ‘… in all cases punishment must be guided by the spirit of love, which intends both the good of the transgressor as well as the good of the community. The spirit of revenge lacks this twofold Christian intention…’ “