The dying days of death penalty

Perhaps a couple of years ago I had written that the death penalty deserves death, one reason being that it is an orphan, no one really feeling comfortable to claim ownership. “Yes, I don’t like it, but we need it, at least for the terrorists.” Yes, the argument went, it is better to let a guilty person go than kill an innocent except if the guilty person is a terrorist. Well, I had a set of arguments against that stand then. In this post, I am going to add one more item to that set.

The tribe of hangman is going extinct. This is the unmistakable message I get from an article in The Economist [1]. There is this hangman in Lucknow, Ahmadullah, a hereditary hangman, does not “wish to see his son continue in the family business.” Why so, may we ask? He obliges: “[H]e sees no future in it.”

I felt deliriously happy reading that! “British rulers ordered ‘so many murders’ [an explicit admission of what death sentence truly is], he says, ‘my father was unable to sit, he was always called for hanging’. Today there is nothing to do.” New and improved delirium!

Is Ahmadullah a malcontent among the hangman tribe? Not a chance. The article says, “He is not, he says, ashamed of his job.” How could he be, when by his own reckoning he may have murdered about 40 people? Further, there is the pride of doing one’s job as well as one can, one’s professionalism: “[the condemned] drops dead, not even alive when he drops, this is my speciality.” Hmm …

In one of my earlier posts, I had asked how one would feel associating with a hangman, an executioner. I got one honest response. A lady commenter said that when her husband and she realized that the tennis buddy of theirs was in an unsavory business, indeed a mere funeral home director, they cut short their friendship. Just imagine the couple serving and volleying with a hangman!

The newspaper piece endorses this sentiment when it quotes Ahmadullah: “People do not look with a very good view on it [hangman’s profession].” This is precisely why “he does not want nosy neighbors discovering his profession.”

There is so much shame attached to the profession, to the act of murdering a person. There is also the anguish of the hangman: “Ahmadullah favors the penalty, though he talks of the harrowing execution of three brothers convicted of murder, one of whom pleaded his innocence-convincingly, Ahmadullah says-to his anguished last breath.”

Add to the above, the not-too-dated brouhaha about the unavailability of one of the chemicals, across the world, that makes up the death penalty protocol cocktail. So, no drugs, no hangman, and the American Medical Association dead set against the involvement of medical professionals in the murder. And, it does look like, Kasab or no Kasab, death penalty is going through its last flickering movements.

This is to hoping for its early demise.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Reference

1. An executioner’s tale, The Economist, February 11, 2012