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Death penalty
Taking
Debate Further
Usha ramanathan
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The logic, and politics, of the death penalty is heavily
under-researched, and so remains poorly understood, in the part
of the world that we inhabit. |
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 The
death penalty is a mystery in our midst. Europe has done away with
it, and that does not seem to have hurt the continent. The United
States is retentionist, and the execution of under-aged, and
mentally handicapped, convicts has given it a reputation that is not
worth envying. Some may have heard of the ‘Executioner’s Current’,
where, fighting a corporate battle with Westinghouse, Edison is said
to have tried to get Westinghouse’s Alternating Current to be used
for the electric chair so that that would be dubbed the ‘killer
current’, leaving virtue with Edison’s Direct Current.
Such tales that
should provide us caution abound. Yet, the logic, and politics, of
the death penalty is heavily under-researched, and so remains poorly
understood, in the part of the world that we inhabit.
Given the
extraordinary power that this punishment vests in the state, this
incurious condition is not quite excusable; yet, it is a fact. This
tremendous effort to investigate the death penalty in Asia is an
opportunity to fathom the meaning of punishment, interrogate the
nature of state power, and understand how international law has
developed, and why.
 The
Indian reader may be somewhat disappointed at finding the Indian
experience tucked away in an appendix.
But the tracking
of the deployment, and occasional disappearance, of the death
penalty in other countries that are part of our extended land mass
holds so many lessons in history, politics, and civil liberties that
this seeming neglect may quickly cease to matter.
A disturbing
finding in this study that spans Japan, the Philippines, South
Korea, Taiwan and China —along with capsules on North Korea, Hong
Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India — is the
extent to which the death penalty is really about state power over
its people, and how marginally about deterrence from crime and
criminality.
When it appears
that Japan ensures that “at least one execution occurs in every
calendar year” so as to forestall the possibility of a moratorium,
as also to avert “a sense of crisis” as the population on death row
approaches a hundred, it should make us worry about what this
penalty actually means. And,what if this country, Japan, retains
this power to take life despite proven miscarriages of justice
resulting from “false confessions and from prosecutors’
non-disclosure of evidence to the defence —problems that continue to
plague Japanese criminal justice to this day”?
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 The
logic, and politics, of the death penalty is heavily
under-researched, and so remains poorly understood, in the part
of the world that we inhabit. Given the extraordinary power that
this punishment vests in the state, this incurious condition is
not quite excusable; yet, it is a fact. |
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The use of the
death penalty against political adversaries has been a recognised
tactic of states. In South Korea, for instance, eight men were
executed in 1975 for treason, as socialists.
In 2007, there
was a retrial where the Seoul Central District Court acquitted all
eight. (Of course, they were all dead by then; but their reputations
were resurrected.) An earlier investigation had concluded that they
had been framed on the orders of President Park, “at a time when
activists and college students were demonstrating against his
dictatorship.”
There is a
moratorium in place in South Korea, but this is an uneasy substitute
for abolition, which surely should have been the consequence of this
demonstrated abuse of the power to kill. In any event, this raises
questions about how wrongful use and application of this penalty
will even be acknowledged in countries where retrials are not known,
and where verdicts are not revisited once they acquire ‘finality’.
 China
and Taiwan have been difficult countries to research, and there is
cause to thank the authors for having so painstakingly put together
the jigsaw, even if woefully incomplete, in relation to them. These
are deeply disturbing chapters to read, and should incite a reaction
even amongst the most sanguine.
There are times
in the reading of the book when the neutral tone of the scholar
comes in the way of challenging or lending meaning to questions
about the death penalty; for instance, where the effect the rhetoric
of terrorism has (or does not have) on the retention and use of the
death penalty remains unspoken.
It does seem, as
it is depicted in the book, that we are passing through times when,
for diverse reasons, the death penalty is on the wane. Alongside,
and somewhat contradictorily, it would appear that too many states
in Asia
are clinging to the symbolic power it represents over the life of
its people.
This is as good
a time as any to look for facts and understand the politics of power
over life that is, in part, represented by the death penalty.
27
May 2009
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