Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash
The whole process of the implementation of the death penalty has always been torturous – from the pronouncement of the penalty to the waiting period for the execution of punishment to the very act of killing.
The psychological torture starts on the very first day of arrest. Interrogators and torturers use the threat of capital punishment as a technique for extracting information and confession from their prisoners. The trauma remains with the prisoners as well as their family members throughout the trial. In the cases of human rights activists or recognized public figures whose fates rest at the mercy of arbitrary judges, the entire society may suffer traumatization. Receiving the official verdict of the death penalty has never been easy for even the strongest individuals who may be notorious for their lack of compassion. Let me share the example of Mr. Ajmal Amir Kasab, who endured seventeen months of trial in Mumbai, India, for causing “death and destruction on the financial capital of the country on November 26, 2008.” He broke down on hearing his death sentence and “sat with his head in his palms” and “asked for a glass of water”. (1)
The agonizing limbo of being on death row begins at the time when victims have their death sentence announced and ends with the implementation of it. This waiting period may take from a few days to a few years. During this time, executioners may use different tactics to maximize their victims’ fear. In an attempt to demoralize other prisoners, the torturers may choose to keep their targets in public cells among other prisoners. Or they may lock them in solitary confinement to make each and every minute of their lives miserable. (2)
One of the most cruel and inhuman conditions of the limbo of death row belongs to female pregnant political prisoners. They must wait until after delivery and sometimes beyond that, until the nursing of their babies is completed. The Iranian writer and ex-political prisoner, M. Raha, shares a tragic story. The following is an excerpt from her testimony:
“She had been given the news about the execution of her husband in jail. She was in love with her husband and was tolerating her tormenting pain by paying a heavy price. One could see the shadow of a deep sadness in her eyes and her young face. She was sentenced to execution, but they had postponed the implementation of the sentence possibly because of her child…. She preferred to be alone, perhaps because of her concern for others; she did not want to transfer her tensions to them.” (3)
To keep their victims in a condition of permanent limbo, some tyrannical governments, including Iran, have invented the sentence of ‘conditional execution.’ They sentence their victims to death, but instead, they are kept in jail for life. A slight change in the behaviour of the prisoner or the policy of the government may persuade prison authorities to implement the sentence. Conditional execution is like a shadow of death haunting the minds of political prisoners at every moment of their lives.
As was seen from the above examples, the psychological and emotional torment of death row is beyond the normal capacity of anyone to endure. The prolonged suffering of a prisoner under this cruel and inhuman condition is nothing less than severe torture. The agony of being on death row may drag the victims to the point of becoming “chronically psychotic” and make them irreversibly incompetent to face the death sentence. On the same token, the execution of “an incompetent condemned person” is also an act of cruelty:
“…execution of an incompetent condemned person constituted “cruel and unusual” punishment. In Justice Powell’s words, the inmate must be “aware of the punishment and why he is to suffer it”. A commonly discussed corollary is that a condemned person should be competent also so that he can face his own death sentence, hopefully to the point of remorse and repentance”. (4)
Death penalties took place in the ancient and medieval era in extremely sordid manners: crashing bones in a breaking wheel, boiling to death, flaying, slow slicing, disembowelment (removing organs one by one, the last ones being lungs and heart), crucifixion, impalement (driving of objects through the body), crushing, burning, dismemberment, sawing, scaphism (slow killing of a victim by confining him in a trough, with his naked body smeared with honey, and exposed to the sun and to insects) and necklacing (forcing a gasoline-soaked tire around a victim's neck and setting it on fire), the Brazen Bull (forcing the victim inside a large hollow brass bull and burning him by a fire lit beneath), Killing by the use of animals (tearing apart by horses, crushing by elephants, being thrown to the lions or snakes, ….), etc.
The above techniques are rare today. However, there are other gruesome methods still in use including stoning, beheading, shooting, hanging, electrocution, lethal gas, and lethal injection. All these techniques, old or new, ancient or modern, are highly torturous, cruel, inhuman and degrading. Let us look at some examples.
Today, stoning remains a legal punishment against alleged adulterers and adulteresses in countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Mauritania. They use a barbarous and primitive method: for a man, a hole is dug, and he is buried in it up to his belly, while a woman is buried up to her armpits. Then, a group of people throw stones at the victims from all sides. Stones should be neither big nor small in an attempt to maximize the victim’s agony. Sometimes, it takes 3 to 4 hours for the victim to die. In many cases, the enforcement officials force the victim’s close relatives, including children, to watch the process. Stoning is perpetrated in public, involving the whole community and converting ordinary people into torturers. To escape suspicion, everyone must throw something, even a small pebble. A terrible psychological torture is inflicted upon victims even before stoning by threatening that Godly tortures await them in hell after death. In some cases, the victims are informed that their bodies are burned, and the ashes are then thrown away. (5)
Beheading or decapitation is a sinister method of execution that is being used mainly in Saudi Arabia for apostasy, murder, adultery, drug trafficking, sodomy, and armed robbery. The victim is carried blindfolded in a police van to a public square. The executioner spread a large plastic sheet on the ground. An officer brings the prisoner to the centre of the sheet in a humiliating way: barefoot, with hands and feet shackled. They make him kneel facing the holy city of Mecca, where the Moslems’ House of God, Ka’abeh, is located. The beheading takes place before a huge crowd. The executioner raises his gleaming traditional Arab scimitar (a curved single-edged sword), swinging it in the air to warm up his muscles. He then approaches the victim from behind and pokes his back abruptly with the tip of the blade, causing him to raise their head. Then, he decapitates him with a single swing of the sword. A doctor stitches the head back on, and the body is carried away and buried in an unmarked grave in the prison graveyard. Beheadings take place for men and women alike. Forty-seven women have been publicly beheaded since 1990, when the practice of beheading women began. The job of executioner is a prestigious one in Saudi Arabia, inherited through generations. (6)
Hanging is used in many countries as a method of execution. It is a practice that violates the right of every human person to be free from torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In August 1983, the then Attorney-General of India described hanging as the best method of execution: “based on the theory that the vascular, nervous and respiratory systems are extinguished in a single moment.” This theory is, however, far from reality. More often than not, hanging turned out to be a technique of atrocious and prolonged torture. A classic example is Nathuram Godse, the man who was hanged on November 15, 1949, for murdering the Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi. He was suspended for fifteen minutes from the scaffold before finally dying. (7) The most recent example belongs to the Iraqi Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the chief judge under Saddam Hussein. He was brought to the execution site in a black hood and red jumpsuit on January 15, 2007. His lawyer had not been permitted to attend his hanging. Mr. Al-Bandar was decapitated on the gallows. His hooded head separated from his body in a cruel and inhuman manner as it plunged through the trapdoor in the execution chamber. (8)
Lethal injection is depicted as a “civilized” method of execution in the United States of America. Since 1976, some 788 people have been executed by lethal injection.
The process involves 3 steps:
1) making the convict unconscious by using an anesthetic injection.
2) relaxing muscles by another injection;
3) Stopping the heart from functioning by using the third injection.
By all intents and purposes, lethal injection is painful and cruel. As the Principles of Medical Ethics prohibit doctors and nurses from participating in executions, the technicians involved are unskilled, and the victims’ agony may last up to ten minutes. They experience asphyxiation, severe burning sensations, massive muscle cramping and cardiac arrest. (9) The following remark is made by Dr. Leonidas Koniaris, a surgeon in Miami: "My impression is that lethal injection as practiced in the US now is no more humane than the gas chamber or electrocution, which have both been deemed inhumane." (10)
Capital punishment does remove the main witness to ghoulish tortures perpetrated against condemned persons before death. In cases of political prisoners, it is often preceded by such ghoulish tortures as rape, mutilations, extracting victims’ blood, etc. Following is the testimony of a reputed Iranian political prisoner about the practice of holy rape before execution in Iran:
The guards and managers of the prison raped women who were sentenced to death on a systemic basis. In this way, they tried to make them sinful and deprive them of any chance to go to paradise. According to the multitudes of verdicts by the clerics, a virgin girl should not be executed. As a sign of their adherence to these verdicts, the guards made sure that no girl in jail died a virgin. Without exception, they raped virgin girls before executing them. (11)
The rapist executioners consecrate their sordid practice by forcefully marrying their victims before execution. It has happened in many cases in Iran that following the implementation of capital punishment, the “bridegroom” has taken wedding sweets to the family of the victim as an announcement of their simultaneous marriage and execution. (12).
The implementation of the death penalty may result in collective trauma when it happens in public. This is an extremely undignified practice that shocks the conscience of every decent human being everywhere. It spreads a culture of violence and revenge among the grassroots population or makes them feel intimidated and impotent.
The death penalty leads to philistinism at the social level by reducing the complexity of crimes to the elimination of their imaginary or real perpetrators. This creepy shortcut replaces cause with effect and obfuscates the eloquent ideal of justice. Besides, the actual implementation of the death penalty requires an administrative apparatus – hangman, firing squad, gallows, execution site, etc. – all reminiscent of our barbarous antiquity. It takes away human compassion and degrades enactors to the rank of death pawns. No decent human being wishes to be an executioner in any circumstances and for any cause whatsoever.
Under tyrannical regimes, the death penalty is used less against organized crimes and more as a tool of intimidation in suppressing political opposition. Under theocratic and totalitarian governments, the death penalty is used to remove enlightened and progressive people who oppose the state religion or official ideology. The death penalty is used frequently in armies, specifically during wartime, for espionage, cowardice, surrender, desertion, insubordination, and mutiny. In many cases, insubordination and personal grudges have acted against innocent people in armies accusing them as spies, traitors, deserters, etc. Unfortunately, there is hardly any effective mechanism, even in advanced industrial nations, to monitor summary trials of military tribunals.
Finally, it should be mentioned that it is impossible to remove the torture and degrading treatment attached to the death penalty without the total abolition of this barbarous practice. We may boast that today, only less than 58 nations actively practice the death penalty. This is, however, misleading, as they include over 60 percent of the global population with the involvement of populous countries such as China, India, USA, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt, Bangladesh, Japan, and Iran. We need to consolidate our solidarity and combine our efforts in struggling against the death penalty – an evil that violates international human rights standards and undermines the global standing against torture and our aspiration for the moral authority of nations.