Helen Zille's view on capital punishment

Question: Would you consider bringing back the death penalty if the Democratic Alliance formed the next government?

Helen Zille replies: The political party I lead, the Democratic Alliance, allows a “free vote” on the issue of the death penalty. In other words, our members and public representatives are free to follow their own conscience and make up their own minds on the issue of capital punishment. The majority of DA members would probably support bringing back the death penalty, but I do not. There are many reasons, besides ethical reasons, for my position.

Firstly, no penalty can serve as a deterrent, unless criminals are actually arrested, charged and convicted. Until this happens, they cannot be sentenced. According to the latest SAPS report tabled in Parliament, our conviction rates are pitifully low. (See answer to question 6). We should therefore focus on rebuilding our criminal
justice system so that it can track down criminals, gather evidence that will stand up in court, and secure convictions. The vast majority of murderers and rapists are never brought to trial. In this context the severity of any theoretical penalty is academic.

A second reason for my opposition to the death penalty is the number of cases that come to my attention where people have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes. These cases reinforce my view that the dangers of the death penalty in our dysfunctional criminal justice system would outweigh any deterrent value that capital punishment might have. Just recently I read a horrific account of a gardener, Mr Gibson Rozani, who was sentenced to a long jail term for allegedly raping a child. Mr
Rozani’s employer (a Mrs Hockly), believing in his innocence, embarked on a long and expensive campaign to establish the facts and secure a retrial, where he was found to have been wrongly convicted and sentenced. It turned out that Rozani’s lawyer in the original trial had persuaded him to plead guilty, without explaining the implications to
him. His lawyer had also failed to place the medical report before the court, which established that the alleged victim was still a virgin and that there was no medical indication that a rape had taken place. Furthermore, the prosecutor had failed to submit the medical report to the magistrate. The safeguards supposedly inherent in our criminal justice system were therefore subverted by a single negligent omission
on the part of both an incompetent defence attorney and the prosecution.

Mrs Hockly’s determination to prove her gardener’s innocence reflects unusual dedication. In most other circumstances, people like Mr Rozani (who does not speak English) could expect to spend many years in jail. If the death penalty is imposed in such circumstances, it is obviously irreversible.

You may also recall the recent case where Mr Fred Van der Vyver, the son of a very wealthy farmer, was acquitted on charges of murdering his girlfriend. His father spent R9-million on his son’s defence, which included the testimony of international forensic experts, who established that police investigators had perjured themselves before the court, and allegedly manufactured incriminating evidence against the
accused. Where police investigators are potentially capable of defeating the ends of justice, and especially where the criminal justice system is open to political influence, it is easy to see how the ultimate penalty could be abused.

In the South African context, where there is still such a discrepancy between justice for the rich and justice for the poor, it is also very difficult to justify the death penalty in situations where people may have inadequate legal defence.

I support very tough anti-crime policies, and believe that a life sentence must mean “life”. But the potential for abuse and injustice through the death penalty in our country, leads me to believe that we should not reintroduce it.

NVDL:

I agree with Zille that our Justice System is the real problem, but in the meantime, is there any disincentive to go out and murder and rape?

... Although if I lived on a small island society with my own family and children and had to set up a system of law I would not introduce capital punishment, I believe it is insanity not to make use of the deterrent effect. I think anyone who advocates this is disconnected from reality, and in their own moral cocoon somewhere in suburbia. Is there a way to get our horrible crime stats down - 50 murders each day in South Africa, and some of the most violent crime in the world?
Even if one multiple serial killer/rapist is put to death each year, this will have the impact of put a few seeds of doubt into would-be-perpetrators. Even if our rates of convictions are abysmal isn't it better to have some deterrent than no deterrent?

I also reject the idea of people being wrongfully put to death. I've always said a death penalty should be applied to the most heinous of criminals - not someone who kills once, but dozens of times, and where there is a surfeit of evidence and grief and suffering caused by this person.

I believe it is crazy to give more rights to criminals than to the ordinary, more moral victims of their actions. In much the same way I believe corporal punishment in SA schools are the unfortunate price to pay to get a higher standard of education from children who otherwise don't know how to behave, and those that do are unfairly influenced and their opportunities unfairly maligned by those who don't.

I believe any person who has it in their heads that the death penalty is immoral ought to look around. Of course it is immoral. It's a device, an extreme method, of treating the extremes, the psychopaths and sickos in society. To trust and hope that good will prevail is a faint hope for the fainthearted.

Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate

“Capital punishment may well save lives,” the two professors continued. “Those who object to capital punishment, and who do so in the name of protecting life, must come to terms with the possibility that the failure to inflict capital punishment will fail to protect life.”

For the first time in a generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for capital punishment.
By ADAM LIPTAK

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades.

“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”

For more go here.

NVDL: I've often heard experts and leaders saying that research shows the death penalty doesn't work. I never believed them. In a perfect society you wouldn't need an imperfect solution like this. We're far from an ideal world, and we're incredibly stupid if we think - in South Africa especially - that we live in one. It's an obscene irony that in our idealised effort to protect human rights, we allow 40 murders to be perpetrated each day.

If you had a child, and every day he killed a different neighbours dog, but all you did was send him to his room, surely as some point you would think of giving (yes, even your own child) a damn good hiding. It's not nice, but it's also not nice for the 14 600 dead people (that's half a stadium or 14 schools).

Hang 'em High

Investec did a recruitment drive once and we were a group of graduates asked to debate whether capital punishment was justifiable. My argument was 'almost never'.

Here is an example of what may be an exeption to the rule: (click on the above title to link to Afrikaans story)
Ziqhu is a dude that worked as a storeman at a local air force base. He raped 12 girls (all under the age of 15 years old, the youngest was 10) despite knowing he had HIV. 2 of his victims now have the HIV virus.

Now one could posit a few mitigating arguments, but the bottom line is:
- he raped all 12
- he knew he had AIDS

It makes me uncomfortable to hear that he listened to his sentence being passed 'showing no emotion'. Perhaps if he was given the death penalty he might have registered some sort of human response, like, "Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe, you know, I hurt someone."

The value of the death penalty in his case will also be to warn similar monsters from committing the same dastardly deeds, and if you think it is not necessary, have a look at South Africa's holocaust like rape and AIDS statistics. So what if he was given 12 life sentences, he will only serve one. He could be given 1000 life sentences, but effectively it is a meaningless punishment. The death penalty is a barbaric way to control elements of barbarism in society. It is not an ideal measure, of course it isn't, but then our society is far from ideal. And of course, in a more ideal (law abiding) society, even with the death penalty in place, it would never be used.

Human beings though, seem to me, to thrive on incentive. In schools it is so obvious: where corporal punishment does not exist, students simply don't have the capacity to know how to behave themselves.

In muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Malaysia, limbs can be cut off for anything from drug smuggling to adultery, (something I consider extreme) yet we also see a very high degree of morality. My point is that to rapidly inculcate a sense of honesty and honor in a lawless society, you have to fight fire to some degree, with fire. Those who accept 12 life sentences as a 'just' punishment are really just fooling themselves. Two of those girls will now slowly be consumed with a deadly disease forced into them. This tragedy happens because human rights and value for the human being are wrongly attributed to all, and thus in this case also specifically to the perpetrator, rather than with due diligence and circumspection to those in society who earn and deserve them (the innocent majority of civilians).

On the issue of abortion we also like to make sweeping moral codes for ourselves. Naturally abortion depends on context. Maybe most of us are just too tired to think, so we give ourselves generalised laws to paint giant brush strokes over the details, and feel better about ourselves, thinking the world is safer. It's not. No, the details of human beings and how differently they live their lives are important, and each case needs to be considered on its own merits.