We have a long way to go before we can call ourselves civilised. There is an old adage which goes: let the punishment fit the crime.
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THE responses of eminent jurists and “youth voices” on the reinstatement of capital punishment in the POST, May 6 – 10, refers:
That eminent jurists like Professors Karthy Govender and Willene Holness, and Lawson Naidoo should invoke our revered Constitution, which unequivocally banned the death penalty, is predictable.
Supporting the call for the death sentence will constitute a conflict of interest in their case. What surprises me is how some of us genuflect uncritically to the Constitution as if it was written by the gods.
I was also surprised by the response of Pundit Lokesh Maharajh who said that judicial execution was against Hinduism. If I have read some of our holy books correctly, the use of force to destroy evil is a theme that runs through the Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata and the Ramayana. I have yet to delve into the multivolume Vedas.
There are basically two lines of argument proffered by those who oppose judicial execution: that it is not a deterrent to violent crime, which is partly true, and that in South Africa, poverty fuels crime, which is also partly true. Partly, because every country has its poor classes, something that Plato observed two thousand years ago.
It is also true that countries where hands are lopped off and murderers shot or hanged, are safer to visit – Botswana, Saudi Arabia, China and India are good examples. Despite the frequent gun violence in the United States, I can still walk the streets of my favourite city, New York, well past midnight.
Put bluntly, death by lynching (there are more “civilised” ways to get rid of society’s scum) was banned in this country when a predominantly black government came into power; because more criminals from the black community were hanged by the apartheid government.
By the way, white people like murderess Daisy de Melker were also hanged.
The argument that our Constitution favours restorative instead of punitive justice is flawed because we have seen paroled criminals repeat their crimes. The uncomfortable truth is that some criminals are beyond redemption. When I was in the Gauteng Department of Education in the mid-1990s, I had to deliver the matric exam question papers to the Johannesburg Prison. Walking past the C-Max cell, what I witnessed was not human behaviour but something I had never seen in the most violent of movies.
Finally, to argue that we are a civilised nation implies that those countries where capital punishment is practised, must be uncivilised. We have a long way to go before we can call ourselves civilised. There is an old adage which goes: let the punishment fit the crime.
HARRY SEWLALL
Sandton