“Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”
Albert Camus—”Reflections on the Guillotine, Resistance, Rebellion & Death” (1956).
Lindsay June Sandifor, a 56-year-old British woman caught smuggling blocks of cocaine in her suitcase has been sentenced to death in Indonesia. Even though prosecutors in Bali had asked for a 15-year sentence, the panel of judges handed down the death penalty. Ms. Sandifor was arrested last May after she was found to have blocks of cocaine weighing 4.7 kilograms (10.4 pounds) in her suitcase when she arrived on the island of Bali.
At the trial, the grandmother from Gloucestershire, England, said she was smuggling the drugs to protect her son. She said one of her co-accused had threatened to kill him if she did not comply. However Indonesian police said she was at the centre of a drugs importing ring involving three other Britons and an Indian who have also been arrested.
Southeast Asian governments impose the toughest drug sanctions on the planet and many impose the death penalty for individuals convicted of drug trafficking. The death penalty for drug cases has received a great deal of criticism from people who think that the penalty does not fit the crime and amounts to a disproportionate sanction.
Meanwhile, in India, the clamor for death sentences for the culprits of the brutal Delhi gang rape, which resulted in the death of a 23-year-old victim and the severe beating of her male companion, grows stronger. The head of India’s rights panel this past Tuesday said death penalty in any case is against the universal declaration of human rights. “[The] death penalty in any case is against universal declaration of human rights,” National Human Rights Commission chairman KG Balakrishnan said. However, it seems by most accounts that a vast majority of the Indian people want the death penalty imposed on the assailants.
According to Amnesty International, the trend internationally is unmistakably moving toward abolition. Use of the death penalty worldwide has continued to shrink, and use of the death penalty has also been increasingly curtailed in international law. Since 1990, an average of three countries each year have abolished the death penalty, and today over two-thirds of the world’s nations have ended capital punishment in law or practice.
Clearly, there is ever more recognition that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to crime, and that the imposition of such a penalty is very costly to democratic governments that must provide for procedural due process protections in its imposition. But, are there crimes that deserve the death penalty? Can we as a society agree as to what crimes deserve the penalty of death? If governments cannot reach a consensus on what crimes deserve the death penalty, should the death penalty be abolished?