Government must abolish death penalty to save taxpayers' millions
Owen Nsala | Wednesday May 10, 2017 15:46
Lawyers have tried the Constitutional route before to challenge the death penalty and all have failed on account that the Court of Appeal is of the opinion that the death penalty has been sanctioned as a law by the Legislature and as such their lordships are not desirous of usurping the role of Parliament. As it is the only people who can abolish the death penalty are those at Parliament.
The Minister of Defence Honourable, Shaw Kgathi has explicitly stated that the debate on whether capital punishment must be abolished is a sensationalised debate as Batswana have not come forth to say the penalty must be abolished. Kgathi says “We are a democratic country, we are not a Government based on sensationalism.
We are not copycats and we do things in the interest of the people we are ruling. These laws were all made based on consultations with Batswana. Until the majority of Batswana believe that we should change our laws to something they may wish to see, we cannot re-think the law on capital punishment.' The utterances by Rre Kgathi are a surprising shift of goal posts as we all know our Parliamentarians rarely consult on issues affecting us.
I offer Government an incentive to abolish the death penalty. In Botswana the right to legal representation is not absolute and an accused person has a right to legal representation of his own choice at his own cost. It is only where capital punishment maybe the penalty to be imposed that Government appoints a pro deo attorney for a murder accused and the State then pays the attorney for defending the murder accused. Dear reader, there are so many murder trials pending before the High Court and on each day Government pays a certain lawyer to represent such an accused person.
If Government abolished the death penalty, the incentive would be that it would be a cost saving measure. All those accused of murder will then have to foot their legal bills.That’s the incentive.
From a personal point of view and with the benefit of having been around murder accused persons I can vouch to Batswana that the notion that the death penalty is itself deterrence for any future killings is not a tenable proposition.
A lot of murder accused persons are from rustic, poor and uneducated backgrounds. The accused persons in most cases do not know the probable penalties and have never heard of capital punishment until they are arrested and have conversations with inmates.
Some murder cases occur in drinking spots and in most cases those emanate from stabbings caused by intoxication, exuberance of youth and sheer depression arising from abject poverty. All the above-mentioned class of murder accused persons and incidents are in most cases oblivious of the sanctions that may befall them and to that extent I aver that the death penalty is by no means a deterrent. If it was meant to be a deterrent, it is a failed deterrent as murder accused sometimes just do not know of it. In any event hangings are shrouded by secrecy such that only those with access to private print media usually know of the hangings. But then again we are not a reading nation. Further on the notion of deterrence is just wishful thinking as the perpetrator would be dead and as such he can no longer be deterred.
The death penalty has its inherent danger in that a Court of law may for various reasons convict a person who is actually innocent. The conviction may come as a result of the inadequacy of the defence team.
In some cases, the State with its massive resources tends to have an upper hand as when it comes to forensic examinations.The expertise lies solely at the State's doorstep and the accused only has to communicate to the findings of the State evidence. In the absence of a qualified expert to challenge the forensic findings, defence attorneys always find themselves challenged when trying to take the so-called experts heads-on as Attorneys are not qualified pathologists and forensic examiners.
In 2015, the Justice Department and the FBI formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an FBI forensic squad overstated forensic hair matches for two decades before the year 2000.
Given the massive resources and the secrecy that surrounds investigations and coupled with the unlawful means with which some investigators acquire evidence against innocent accused persons, sometimes the competence of the defence attorney is a better predictor of whether or not someone will be sentenced to death than the facts of the crime.