The Tribune

• THIS column was originally published in 2014, and is reprinted with the issue still unresolved.

Former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Nassau, the late Lawrence Burke, SJ, lamented that many Bahamians often seemed more fixated on Good Friday, less seized by the assurance and promise of Easter Sunday.

His was an insight of a theological mindset resident in a culture steeped in religious fundamentalism with an attendant deep-seated negativity about the human condition and human possibility.

The image of the wrathful avenging God of much of the Hebrew Scriptures more often seems to hold our spiritual and religious imaginations 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, ie, 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 tend to be a fundamentalist culture steeped in the psychology and theology of revenge and an eye for an eye. 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, speaks to a certain mindset.

While some sort of a retributive response in terms of punishment is a necessary component of fundamental justice, retaliation is a different ethical species.

It is a culture of retaliation by gangs, drug dealers and others that is significantly responsible for the cycle of violence and viciousness and murder and mayhem that continues to produce a body count recorded in blood and, at the carnage in Fox Hill, a killing of innocents.

Amidst the bloodshed by criminals, many now want the state to respond by shedding blood in the form of capital punishment.

In an article, Governor General Sir Arthur Foulkes commented on the cry for capital punishment from various quarters: “‘Personally, I don’t agree with capital punishment. The young people are killing one another and you are telling them violence is not the answer.

“‘But what do you do to cure the problem? You resort to violence? You join the killing spree? No. I don’t think that’s the answer. It gives you the false idea that, that would help to solve the problem. The problem is bigger than that.

“‘The solution to the problem is more complex. It demands more thought, more social action, more calculated, planned interventions to bring about change. And we have to save those young men, not destroy them or not join in the process of destruction.’”

In terms of jurisdictions which retain capital punishment, The Bahamas is mostly not in the best of company. But Sir Arthur is in noble company with Nelson Mandela and South Africa, where the death penalty has been abolished.

A previous Front Porch column, entitled, “Pandering to Bloodlust: The Politics of Capital Punishment”, touched on the political manoeuvring by some politicians on this highly emotive issue.

Additionally, no major political party in The Bahamas has applied a litmus test to its members on capital punishment, a matter of conscience.

Reportedly, on the eve of the 1994 South African election which brought Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to office for the first time, an election consultant from the US advised the ANC to remove the moratorium on executions instituted by outgoing President FW deKlerk.

Mandela and his party were advised that such a move might help the ANC to win a two-thirds majority. He rejected the ploy to reinstitute hangings, though it would have been widely popular.

In a blog posted online on December 13, 2013, titled, “Mandela and the Death Penalty”, Carolyn Hoyle noted: “On a day when the world mourns the death of Nelson Mandela, it is worth remembering his role in de Klerk’s remarkable move to abolish the death penalty in South Africa.

“Despite the fact that the South African Transitional Constitution of 1993 was silent on the matter of whether or not the death penalty was permissible, the Attorney-General, in line with President Mandela’s long-held belief that the death penalty was barbaric, brought a case before the Constitutional Court, arguing that the death penalty should be declared unconstitutional.

“The Court, in the landmark judgment of The State v T Makwanyane and M Mchunu in 1995 decided that capital punishment was incompatible with the prohibition against ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ punishment and with a ‘human rights culture’ which made the rights to life and dignity the cornerstone of the Constitution. A further influential argument was that it would be inconsistent with the spirit of reconciliation, post-apartheid.

“Despite the fact that political parties such as the Freedom Front Plus, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Pro-Death Penalty Party have argued for reinstatement of capital punishment in South Africa, on the grounds that it is necessary to reduce the country’s very high homicide rate, it is very unlikely that there would be a parliamentary majority for the constitutional amendment that would be necessary. Such is the legacy of Nelson Mandela.”

It is a source of bemusement and amusement that some who often lionise Mandela are less apt to follow his legacy.

Mandela, like many others, opposed the death penalty for a complex of reasons, a prime one of which is the possibility of the state executing an innocent person.

The late Paul Adderley, an accomplished jurist 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 other opponents.

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

Paul Adderley went even further. He noted that he 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 is also personally opposed to capital punishment, and shares Adderley’s concern over the possibility of executing an innocent person.

Ingraham has noted: “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 are long in every country in which capital punishment is practised.

There remains concern over perhaps two 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 admonishes: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”.

Scholars point out 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”.

Genesis 18:23-32: Abraham drew near, and said, “Will you consume the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous within the city? Will you consume and not spare the place for the fifty righteous who are in it? ... What if ten are found there?” He [The Lord] said, “I will not destroy it for the ten’s sake.”

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

Statistics show that capital punishment has not been a deterrent to future murders in any country. Countries that practice capital punishment do not necessarily record lower crime or murder rates than do countries that have abolished capital punishment.

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 moral arguments touted by many in The Bahamas for capital punishment seem more like those of 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.

In our justifiable outrage at crime and our responsibility to punish those convicted of murder we need not stoop to the 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.