The political carnival which frustrated the government’s recent attempts to pass a “hanging bill” in the Trinidadian parliament had little to do with a serious debate of the issues, constitutional or otherwise. Setting aside the opposition’s calculated provocations and the “political obstructionism” of which the Attorney General complained, it seems clear that both sides are aware of the country’s willingness to reactivate executions. Public support in Trinidad for a return to hanging is overwhelming – one credible poll recently found that more than 90 per cent of the public is in favour of capital punishment. With 85 murders already committed this year and almost 1500 recorded in the previous three – an astonishingly high murder rate for a population of 1.2 million – it is not hard to see why.
The unchecked growth of violent crime in Trinidad, Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean has done much to enhance the emotional appeal of the death penalty, despite the perception that even when governments manage to secure convictions there are often significant legal delays before a death sentence can be carried out. Public impatience with the law’s slow progress is evident in many other parts of the world, particularly in the United States. In a very thorough analysis of America’s long history of the death penalty, the legal scholar and sociologist David Garland notes that a “lengthy and elaborate legal process has become a central feature of American capital punishment.” This has occasionally resulted in delays between sentencing and execution of more than twenty years. The recent debate in Trinidad focused largely on this delay, and the government’s eagerness to get around to executing convicted murderers, but there are other questions worth considering.
Opponents of capital punishment often argue that there it fails to deter violent crime. This is unquestionably the case in Trinidad and Tobago. When, for example, the drug dealer Dole Chadee was executed with eight of his associates in June 1999, the hanging had no effect whatsoever on the local murder rate. In fact, on the very day Chadee was hanged, a murder was committed within walking distance of the gallows. There are also serious doubts about the efficiency of the capital process. In the United States, where the legal system, despite its unevenness, provides defendants with an unusually robust appeals process, there is an unsettling history of wrongful convictions. As Garland points out, the exoneration of capital prisoners in the US “has become a recurring feature of the system; indeed since 1973, more than 130 people have been exonerated and freed from death row.”
Beyond these obvious caveats, there is a much greater reservation that proponents of the death penalty should consider, namely that the police rarely catch the perpetrators of violent crimes and homicides. Even if all the convicted murderers in the Caribbean were executed without delay, their disappearance would do little to bring down the rate of violent crime. Debates about capital punishment often fail to address this elephant in the room because of the deep-seated conviction that a government willing to embrace extreme measures is de facto “tough on crime.” But there is no evidence that executions deter criminals when there is no reasonable expectation of being caught. Better policing sounds like a mild antidote to the epidemic of violent crime, but it would certainly have a greater impact than any number of executions, however swift and brutal.
Two other questions are also worth asking whenever capital punishment is discussed. Why have so many civilized countries – most notably those within the European Union, which demands abolition as a condition of membership – chosen to get rid of capital punishment? The most obvious answer is that these countries, many of which have suffered long periods of repressive government, know too well how badly the system can be abused. The second question is whether the use of capital punishment in pariah states like Iran – which reportedly hanged nearly 100 prisoners in January – can be divorced from considerations of its use elsewhere? The overwhelming majority of human rights groups argue, persuasively, that it cannot. A great deal of modern history suggests that capital punishment is inconsistent with the search for more civilized forms of justice. The finality of state-sanctioned killing is undeniably attractive to most citizens who want the government to fight crime at all costs, but despite its widespread use throughout the twentieth century, capital punishment has never delivered the deterrence, or justice, that its political and emotional appeal seem to promise.
