Hulftsdorp Hill

13th June 1999

Will death by hanging end brutal murder?

By Mudliyar

A few years back a de-bate was held on National Television on the pros and cons of capital punishment. The panel that led the proposition that capital punishment should be re-introduced in Sri Lanka was headed by H.L. de Silva, P.C.

Dr. Colvin R. de Silva led the team that opposed it.

The debate was an excellent audio visual spectacle. Dr. Colvin de Silva with his theatrics and ability to play with words, outshone everyone else and if an opinion poll was taken, he would have won without difficulty. He was also able to convince the audience that a government had no power or legal right to take the life of another. For him it was legalised murder.

Times have changed and crimes have increased. Rape and murder have become daily occurrences. Civil society is outraged by the inability of the penal laws and the establishment to counter and combat crime. The public outcry is for the re-introduction of capital punishment.

The Rita John rape and murder case horrified the people. In the midst of this cry for justice the people had forgotten that capital punishment had been tried and tested in Sri Lanka and that the rate of murder had not decreased.

Prior to the abolition of the death penalty by the late S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the rate of murder in Sri Lanka had been the highest or one of the highest in the world. This proved that although the death penalty was in force it did not deter those who committed murder.

Today although the electric chair, the guillotine or the gallows exists in other countries, the number of murders has not reduced. On the other hand the Scandinavian countries where capital punishment has long been abolished, murder is virtually non-existent

Professor Savithri Gunasekera in a TV talk-show recently complimented C.R. de Silva P.C. and the Additional Solicitor General for the manner in which they conducted the investigation and prosecution in the Rita John rape and murder case.

The swiftness in which the entire crime was solved and suspects apprehended was indeed an achievement for the much criticized law enforcement officers of the country. The Hokandara murder case will also soon be tried in the High Court at a Trial-at-Bar and the decision of the Court would be made public within a short time.

To combat the rise in crime, public opinion was focused on meting out the cruelest possible punishment on the suspects. Some people had put up card board cutouts of the suspects in the Rita John murder case with tyres round their necks, virtually approving ‘tyre pyres’.

The question here is whether the re-introduction of hanging would reduce the rate of murder. If the deterrent theory of punishment was not proved fruitful in the past, would it be so in the future?

In Lybia when Qaddafi captured power through a revolution he enforced the Quaranic Sharia law of punishment where for theft, an offender’s hands were cut off. After a few years when he was travelling in the country, he found many people without hands begging on the streets.

He soon found out that these were people whose hands were cut off as punishment for theft. They had become a severe burden to society. They were useless like chattel. He decreed the suspension of the Quaranic law of punishment and got the convicts to work in large scale development projects as manual labourers.

An interesting remark was made recently by Jayantha Weerasinghe, a senior lawyer who mainly appears for those accused in murder cases. After being witness to a case where a woman falsely accused a man, where it had been established beyond doubt he had never been at the scene of offence, said he is against capital punishment and the death sentence as it is easy to hang any number of innocent suspects on false testimony.

Leonard Woolf in his autobiography ‘Growing’ gives a vivid description of executions that took place at the Bogambara prisons.

All those who demand the re-introduction of capital punishment will never understand the trauma any civilized person undergoes witnessing the hanging of a man.

“In Kandy executions took place in the Bogambara Prison in the early mornings before breakfast. To be present at them was a horrifying experience, and the more I had to witness, the more horrible I found them – and I think this was the experience of almost everyone who had to be present. Kandy was, as I have already said more than once, a lovely place and it never looked more lovely than in the early morning when I stood in the Bogambara Prison in front of the gallows and everyone waited for me to give the signal to the executioner for the “drop” which would hang the man, I stood rather above the gallows and in front of me in the fresh air and gentle sunshine just after dawn I looked across to the lovely hills surrounding the Lake.

“The procedure was that I first went to the condemned man’s cell, read over to him the warrant of execution, and asked him whether he had anything to say. Some said no; several of them asked that their bodies after execution should be handed to their relatives; once the man said to me: “I have been guilty of a crime; I am glad to be punished.” I think that all the men I saw hanged were Buddhists and were accompanied to the gallows by a priest. “After I read the warrant, the condemned man was led out of the cell, clothed in white, on his head a curious white hat which at the last moment was drawn down to hide his face. In most cases they seemed to be quite unmoved as they walked to the scaffold, but one man was in a state of terror and collapse and had to be almost carried to the gallows by the wardens, and all the way he kept repeating some words of a Sinhalese prayer, over and over again, and even as he stood with the rope round his neck waiting for the drop. “The man was led up on to the scaffold by the warders, his arms were pinioned, and the hat drawn over his face. I had to stand immediately facing him on a kind of verandah where I could see the actual hanging.

“On the steps of the gallows the priest stood praying. In two out of the six or seven hangings which I had to certify something went wrong. In one case the man appeared not to die immediately; the body went on twitching violently and the executioner went and pulled on the legs. In the other case four men had to hang one morning and they were hanged two by two. The first two were hanged correctly, but either they gave one of the second two too big a drop or something else went wrong for his head was practically torn from his body and a great jet of blood spouted up three or four feet, covering the gallows and the priest praying on the steps.”

Mr. Leonard Woolf was the Office Assistant to the Government Agent, Kandy in 1905. His thinking even 94 years ago seemed to be precocious and would be true today or even in another 100 years time. Unless there is a social reformation and we as Sri Lankans become more civilised and more humane, the rate of murder will not recede. To titillate our barbarous sensations, the Government may even decree public hanging, flogging at Galle Face, or other public places, with the hope of reducing crime. But it would have only a negative effect, people becoming more cruel and more revengeful. The thoughts of Leonard Woolf are not surprising though he was an imperialist master serving the British Government. His compassionate thoughts may have been influenced by the high degree of civilisation he had achieved in the West. I do not know whether Mr. Woolf’s attitude was influenced also by the preaching of the Buddha which he learnt from a monk called Gunaratne. This is what he says about Buddhism, “ I am essentially and fundamentally irreligious, as I have explained in ‘sowing’, but, one must have a religion. Buddhism seems to me to be superior to all other religions, yet when all this has been said Buddhism, even in its debased or most unsophisticated form, even in the devil worshipping villager and village priest, was in many ways a good religion. The way of life as preached by Gautama Buddha is extraordinarily gentle, unaggressive, humane, far more so it seems to me in its verbal presentation and attitude than even that preached in the Sermon on the Mountain”

He has condemned not only capital punishment but also flogging or whipping. Even today it is extremely unfortunate that some Magistrates order flogging as a mode of punishment. As the AGA Kandy, Mr. Leonard Woolf was present when there was flogging and hanging. This is what he says about flogging. “The flogging of a man with a cat-o’-nine-tails is the most disgusting and barbarous thing I have ever seen. It is worse even than a hanging. The man is tied by his arms and legs to an iron triangle which is about six foot high and he is given the lashes by a warder in presence of the Deputy Fiscal, a Medical Officer, and the Superintendent of the Prison. His back is literally flayed by the lash and after every ten lashes he is examined by the Medical Officer who has to stop the flogging if in his opinion the man is not in a condition to stand any more punishment.”

But it is indeed paradoxical that a majority of Sri Lankans who are Buddhists are demanding in unison the re-introduction of capital punishment in the false hope that it would reduce murder and crime in Sri Lanka. But they are strangely silent when the Government opened bars in every junction. Similarly they are the people who patronise the illicit liquor dens. Heroin and other drugs are marketed and consumed by the majority of Sinhala Buddhists. Politicians openly patronise the underworld to run these illicit dens. The casino empires and foreign prostitutes have become a common feature in the city and it is very well known that the Government permitted the opening of a casino when it was closed under a supposedly corrupt Government.

The most devastating indictment on capital punishment was given by Leonard Woolf who witnessed the gory details and the horrible spectacles of men being hanged. As I said before, what Leonard Woolf said in 1905 is ever more true today, as truth can never be buried; it can only be suppressed temporarily The opponents of capital punishment are projecting their inner conscience. Man is inherently cruel. It is only years of civilization that make men less cruel and more humane. It is with great self restraint we are able to suppress our feelings of cruelty which surfaces when our basic instincts are aroused. The animal in man takes over a very normal human being. What we saw in July 1983 and 1988/89 was a reflection of our cruel nature. Those who violently demand the re-introduction of capital punishment would have acquiesced in the cruel murders in these two periods of terror.

As for those who support capital punishment, I would recommend them to read a passage from Leonard Woolf: “I give these repulsive details because those who support capital punishment in the 20th century pretend that it is a necessary, human, civilised form of punishment.

As a form of punishment, it is disgusting and, as I saw it, disgustingly inefficient. From the point of view of society and criminology, in my opinion, it is completely useless. The men whom I saw executed had all committed unpremeditated crimes of violence, killing from passion, anger, or in a quarrel. Not one of them was deterred from killing by the fact that hundreds of other men in Ceylon had been hanged for precisely similar killings. All the evidence, in all countries and at all times, goes to show that capital punishment is not a deterrent of crime; in fact, by the mystique of horror which it creates it tends to induce pathological or weak-minded people to imitate the crimes for which they have recently been executed. This is particularly true today when uncivilised “popular” newspapers with gigantic circulations exploit – sensationalise and sentimentalise – the horrors, particularly of sexual murders of children, and a series of similar crimes follows. It is characteristic of these journals and their millionaire proprietors that they are hysterically in favour of retaining capital punishment as a deterrent, while exploiting and sensationalising rapes, murders and murderers (as well as their own incomes).

About the criminal law this is what Woolf said “In Ceylon I saw for several years the working of the criminal law from the inside, in my small way, as administrator, as magistrate and judge, and as a public servant intimately concerned with the police and prisons. In fact, I should say that the best chance of getting uncivilised laws abolished or changed is that they should be strictly applied by civilised judges who abhor them.

Sitting on the bench or visiting prisons in Jaffna, Kandy, or Tangalla fifty years ago, I felt again and again that much of our criminal law was both uncivilised and stupidly inefficient as a method of punishing or deterring crime. I am sure that it still is both in Ceylon and in Britain. In those days the prison system was more barbarous and iniquitous even than the law.

The prisoners were confined in cages like those in the lion house in the Regent’s Park Zoo, two, three, or even four men sometimes in a cage. The buildings were horrible.

The prisoners hammered coconuts into coir or walked round and round the yard holding on to a moving rope which, I imagined, was a modern version of the ancient treadmill.”

Ninety five years later we are re-echoing the sentiments expressed by Woolf. In fact the conditions have not changed. Instead it may have got worsened. Especially the conditions in prisons with today’s overcrowding, Regent’s Park Zoo in London must be considered a heaven.

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