The death penalty – a MADder doctrine

I need to tell you about MAD before getting to MADder. MAD sustains the nuclear arsenal of the US and Russia. The acronym stands for “Mutually Assured Destruction”, in the context of nuclear deterrence.

The hawks of the US were alarmed when spontaneous, well-meaning yet ineffective talks of serious nuclear disarmament were making the rounds sometime in the 1980s. Critics of nuclear disarmament say that it would undermine deterrence (remember this when I take up death penalty). Of course, the nuclear disarmament insanity was never sustainable and then MAD became entrenched – both countries now retain the capability to annihilate the other and MAD survives. But, will the world survive the MAD doctrine? No, at least it will not exist to witness MAD doctrine being proven wrong! Thank Game Theory and Nash Equilibrium.

I thought of the above in the context of the continuing clamor for death penalty. The noise is generated and sustained by the equivalent of “The hawks of the US” which in this case translates into the unreconstructed death penaltyists vis-à-vis the abolitionists. Now and then, the abolitionists engage, at least try to engage, the other side to eliminate death penalty from the statute books. In the most recent instance, there are many calls to spare the life of the people convicted of murder in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case. The point cited is the 11 year gap in the process, a time of prolonged “torture” of the convicts on death row.

It appears that there are instances when the death penaltyists are almost convinced but there is the old reliable cat’s paw of revenge, conveniently disguised as justice to the victim, avenging an act against society. The other day I read a series of letters to the editor in a newspaper, which had earlier argued that the Supreme Court of India should commute the death sentence whose mercy petitions were rejected by the President of India. I do not know what the arguments can be for the court to go against what the president has already pronounced upon. But the letter writers do not want to remain mute spectators to the proceedings of the Supreme Court. They want to be proactive and they cited deterrence as the key enabling feature of death penalty.

This is where the death penalty becomes a MADder doctrine. But, before I take up deterrence, I would venture into a few other aspects of how death penalty is justified. It is merely asserted - never is any chain of arguments advanced to support the case – that the crime against the victim has been effectively avenged. Revenge conveniently metamorphoses into avenge, a more legalistic and less personal term. “Big Brother” of George Orwell’s 1984 would have been proud. He is mad and he sees the society following in his footsteps.

Then, our statutes themselves, or judgments from the bench provide an escape clause to a few criminals, the chosen few – a crime of passion. The passion is merely one of love, like in the recent verdict on the infamous case of Tandoori Murder.

The passion of love is an extenuating circumstance but a passion of hatred is not. Think of this within the framework of freedom of speech where restrictions based on the content of speech have to pass severe scrutiny. I would not want to say anything more on this, except that society, ably aided and abetted by Indian jurisprudence, has climbed one more rung on the MAD scale, becoming more MADder.

I would not want to accord any respectability to the argument based on saving tax dollars by killing a human life.

Then, it is time for me to come to the deterrence argument, the mainstay of the MADder doctrine. No research has ever conclusively proven that death penalty deters crime. This stands to reason because the crime – murdering someone – is inherently an insane act and no reasoning is ever going to convert such insanity. But this never satisfies the death penaltyists. One more rung of the MAD doctrine has been climbed to make it MADder.

It is beyond me to even imagine how many more steps are to be scaled to reach the apex of the MADder doctrine. But, as and when another rung appears, count on me to bring that to your notice.

The MAD doctrine is fixed but the MADder doctrine evolves, assuring every step of the way towards mutual destruction of a human being and also of the society.

Raghuram Ekambaram