Opinion  Ghanaian Chronicle  - December 13, 2001:

GHANA: Don't Abolish Capital Punishment

In any view the argument that death penalty should be scrapped because it is not a deterrent does not hold much water. It is a fact that some people who commit other crimes and are convicted come back from prison to repeat the same crimes and add others. Is that the reason why people should not be punished for breaking the laws of the land? More importantly in the specific case of murder if death penalty is removed from the statute books it would rather encourage more violence.

 This is because people would hold the view that if a convicted murderer would no longer be killed they would lose confidence in the judicial system and take the law into their own hands. When this happens the likelihood of innocent people being killed by mobs would be the order of the day. This would definitely lead to chaos, ethnic and tribal conflicts, more deaths with their attendant repurcussions on the state.

SERIAL MURDERER

 Again the argument that criminal justice has not been a deterrent is not wholly true because there is also no statistics to show the extent to which crime would increase with or without punishment. That is to say if by the present system murder increases by 10 per cent, it may be that without death penalty the increase could have been 20 %. This is because the probability of a murderer killing people again and again is greater than a person who has never shed blood before killing another person. The case of the serial murderer who has admitted killing eight innocent women is just one example.

 Again still on the issue of deterrence, I think that criminal justice to a very large extent serves as a deterrent. The fact that same convicted criminals repeat their crimes is not that they are not deterred but because they know that by the methods they adopt it would be impossible to see them in the act and prosecute them and no wonder most of these crimes like stealing, armed robbery and murder are committed during the night under cover of darkness.

 We should also not forget that criminal justice is supposed to serve at least one of the following purposes --retribution, reformation and deterrence, so that if capital punishment serves its retributive purpose it must be sufficient. If it is not a deterrent, it is not reformative either and so it must continue to be retributive.

 Further it is a well known fact that most convicted criminals do not reform after serving whatever punishments that are meted out to them especially narcotic offenders, so the argument that capital punishment should be scrapped because murderers need to be reformed cannot be tenable. Every normal human being appreciates and recognises the value of life and except hardened and incorrigible elements in society people would normally not take other people's lives.

 On the issue of compensation, if a convicted murderer happens to be a man of straw, how can he afford to pay compensation? Again if the victim has no children or relatives who will benefit from the compensation even where the murderer happens to be man of substance? If compensation is taken as a better substitute would it not be the influential and affluent in society killing people they don't like, paying compensation and getting away with crimes?

BARBARIC ACT

 Recently the Daily Graphic reported that a 29-year-old man beheaded a 60-year-old woman and dumped the head of the woman some 50 metres away and blamed his act on the devil. If this act is not barbaric and backward then I am afraid we are being too modern and over scientific.

 As rightly pointed out by Mr. Emile Short on a TV programme as some of the very few reasons in support of capital punishment, it is an expression of society's moral outrage for murder and the society's way of protecting its citizenry from murderers.

 In my opinion, of all the arguments advanced in favour of abolishing capital punishment, the most interesting and unsympathetic is the argument that life is sacred and that apart from God nobody has the right to take human life.

 In the 1st place, this argument is self-defeatist. It should rather be taken against the murderer and not the society that is legally empowered to take a person's life as a punishment for taking another person's life. The Akan proverb that "dee otwe sekan no wu wo sekan ano" literally translated as whoever draws the dagger dies on the dagger underlines my view.

 Most importantly we should all know that if a murderer without any just eause denies another person of his God given right to live, there is no reason why the murderer should think of enjoying the same life that he had denied his fellow human being.

 Apostle Kwamena Ahinful who may not side with me, writing under the title "Is America waging a just way" in the November 3, 2001 issue of The Mirror at page 16 quotes Johnson and Cohen of their "widely accepted precept that people who murder by attacking the innocent should be considered to have sacrificed the victims' right to life, therefore, it is just or acceptable to kill by taking the life of a murderer if it is the only way to protect the innocent".

DEATH PENALTY

 As I have noted earlier on, the probability of a murderer killing another person again and again is very great and as the proponents against the death penalty have always argued that death penalty is not a deterrent, any such murderer who is given a life sentence may for one reason or the other have his freedom and repeat his crimes and it will be difficult to protect the innocent.

 The maxim "an eye for an eye" makes the whole world blind may be true but only to some extent. It is not everybody who would think of going for another person's "eye" for his to be removed as a punishment. Again the law prescribes a specific punishment for every offence and the nature of the punishment depends on the type of offence committed. That is to say there are different types of offences as there are punishments.

 Therefore, only those who would go for other peoples "eyes" would have their 'eyes' removed. There would, therefore, continue to be "blind" men and people with "sight" and so the word would never "go blind".

Further, experience has shown that almost in all cases punishments meted out to offenders are severe than the crime they commit. The case of Mallam Issa shows that apart from his four year jail sentence he was fined �10 million and ordered to refund the 46,000 dollars he allegedly stole which was the subject of the offence.