The pros and cons of capital punishment

Coinciding with Easter, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo commuted the death sentence of about 1200 convicts to life imprisonment. The most interesting true story of a person who was saved from the gallows is about a condemned man who literally survived three attempts to hang him. John Lee, a 19-year old servant was sentenced to be hanged at Exeter Gaol in Devon. The wooden gallows had warped in the rain and would not open and for three consecutive times the trapdoor would not open when Lee was placed in it to be executed. The irony was that it worked perfectly well every time he was not on it. The authorities decided to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. Lee spent 22 years in jail and was released in 1907. He later immigrated to the United States, got married there and died of natural cause in 1933 at the age of 67.

The death penalty is undoubtedly a deterrent to crime. No criminal who was executed ever committed another crime. Whether it deters other criminals from committing crimes is a separate question.

In Britain, they abolished capital punishment in 1964 when there were only 300 murders committed. By 1994, it had risen to 565 and by 2004, it reached to 833. To make matters worse, 71 of the murders committed were by convicts who had been released after serving life sentences in the period between 1965 and 1998. During the five years that capital punishment was suspended, murders that would have merited a death sentence rose by 125 percent.

In the United States, it is the opposite. During the period of increased use of the death penalty, the murder rate dropped from 24, 562 in 1933 to 18,209 in 1997, a 26 percent reduction.

Different countries use different methods of imposing the death penalty. Basically, there are four methods: hanging, lethal injection, shooting and electrocution. In the Philippines, we use the electric chair.

And all countries have only three options. The first, of course, is not to have the death penalty. We simply cope with the number of murders and serious crimes that we presently have by sending those convicted to prison. The other is to have the death penalty for the very worst criminals meaning those who themselves have taken other people's lives.

As far as we can tell, there is really no way to tell if capital punishment serves to deter serious crimes. We believe that better than the death penalty, what would discourage all forms of crimes is if the wrongdoers were quickly arrested, tried and if found guilty convicted to serve a term in prison. People commit crimes because they expect to get away with it.

What we would like to see is the proper training of prisoners. By proper training we mean they should not only be imprisoned, they should be taught some basic skills so that they can earn a good living after they are freed. More often than not, people who are imprisoned come out worse than before they got in. That is because of exposure to more hardened criminals. Our jails are first of all overcrowded. I find it difficult to figure out how we could have so many as 1200 convicts supposedly waiting execution. Some believe that capital punishment serves to deter crime. Others think that it just increases the number of people killed. What we would like to see are death convicts that are not only saved from the electric chair but turned to model prisoners.