Are executions good for society?

A senior Cheong Wa Dae official last week stated, “There should be discussions on whether executions can deter crimes first. There should be a social consensus to resume carrying out the death penalty.”

We don’t know who issued this comment, because it was ― as is the accepted norm ― given “on condition of anonymity.” But putting unaccountable government officials aside, the comment was made in the wake of a number of brutal murders and rapes that have occurred across South Korea in the past month.

An online poll, those most dubious of sources (aside from anonymous ones), recently produced data claiming to show that 60 percent of South Koreans want the country to resume executions. Whether this number is true or not, it is inevitable, whenever a nation is hit by a violent crime wave, that sectors of society hit the streets seeking revenge, not justice. A group of female activists at a rally in central Seoul last Sunday opined, “They (people convicted of serious offenses) are beasts, not humans. Don’t spend our money on feeding them. The government should execute them and remove them from society as quickly as possible. That’s the only way to prevent such heinous crimes.” The final point is a passionate conclusion, but is it evidentially true? Lee Young-ran, a law professor at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, certainly thinks so. “Resuming execution should be positively considered because it can make our society safer from criminals,” he told this newspaper on Tuesday. An authoritative sounding opinion, but is it supported by research and evidence that presumably, a professor of law values greatly?

According to Amnesty International, the five nations that carried out the largest number of executions around the world last year were:

1) China (no statistics are available because the Chinese government categorizes this information as a “state secret.” However, the number of people executed is estimated to be in the “thousands.”

2) Iran 360 + for “offenses’’ including apostasy (renouncing religion).

3) Saudi Arabia 82 + cited offenses leading to execution include “sorcery.’’

4) Iraq 68 + the new republic sadly perpetuating a new culture of death.

5) The United States of America 43, including in the state of Texas last month, a man with an IQ of 61 diagnosed as “mentally retarded.’’ Fifty four-year-old Marvin Wilson was executed by lethal injection against a Supreme Court constitutional ruling in 2002 that barred the execution of mentally retarded people on the basis that it is “cruel and unusual punishment’’ prohibited by the 8th Amendment. The politically appointed occupants of the Supreme Court bench, however, can sleep easy at night because they also input the legal provision that individual states, not them, must decide whether a condemned person is in fact “mentally retarded’’ or not. This removes any ongoing responsibility for this issue from the highest federal court.

In South Korea, the last time the death penalty was administered was Dec. 30 1997, at the end of the Kim Young-sam administration. On that night, 23 people ― 18 men and 5 women ― were hanged, according to a 2002 Amnesty International release, “without advance warning in prisons across the country. It is still unclear why the authorities chose Dec. 30 to carry out mass hangings, after a two-year period without executions.”

This disturbing and still quite recent event should be warning enough of how open to abuse the death penalty can be at a local level. Why indeed were the mass hangings carried out? It might well be impossible to ever determine the cause. However, given that the then incoming President Kim Dae-jung was sentenced to death in 1980, a person or persons in the unseen establishment might well have feared that individuals they wished to be executed could well have had their sentences reduced or overturned under the new administration. Will there ever be a probe into the circumstances of the 1997 executions? For a full debate about the possible reintroduction of the death penalty in South Korea, there should be. Indeed this would inform and therefore greatly benefit the discussions towards a “social consensus’’ on the issue that the anonymous spokesperson for Cheong Wa Dae proposes. Then the Korean people can weigh up for themselves the pros and cons of potentially putting their lives at the will of the state ― granted if they perpetrate or are convicted of a serious offense ― but that this power is also open to political abuse, as it is in all countries that administer the death penalty and as it has been in Korea in the past. Lest we forget, North Korea still applies the death penalty, 30 plus dead last year for “offenses’’ about which we can only begin to imagine.

Returning to the central point the protesting women in downtown Seoul and Professor Lee at Sookmyung University made we should consider: Does the death penalty act as a deterrent? There have been a number of studies conducted in the United States, not least among them, one by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which in its 2010 “Uniform Crime Report’’ shows that the southern states in the U.S. had the highest murder rate but that the same states accounted for 80 percent of executions nationwide. This shows conclusively and at a glance that a region which regularly ― and in the case of Texas ― determinedly, practices execution, there is no reduction in the number of murders.

Moreover, a report from the National Research Council in the U.S. headed “Deterrence and the Death Penalty” concluded that studies which purport to show the death penalty is a deterrent are “fundamentally flawed” and not to be used as material on which to base policy decisions. Anonymous at Cheong Wa Dae, please take note. Hopefully the ladies protesting in Seoul and Professor Lee will also take an active interest in this information.

Another factor to consider is: will a potential murderer inflamed by homicidal urges stop to debate the consequences of their actions if the death penalty is available? Murder is a complex consequence of motive, opportunity and the vagaries of the human spirit. There is little space for or likelihood of weighing consequences when taking life.

Of course, the depths of grief and anger that relatives of victims who are murdered or raped experience cannot be fully understood by those of us untouched directly by such events. Their need of justice is beyond question. But does the death penalty provide justice? It’s possible to answer this question with another: If murder is wrong, is it right and just for the state to murder another person in order to prove it so? Clearly logic shouts “No!’’ Of course, it is easy to offer such a rhetorical loop when uninvolved with profound depths of grief and rage. But that is exactly what the justice system is for: to provide a system detached from raw emotions in order to achieve justice.

The writer is currently a resident in Seoul. <The Korea Times/Andrew Forth>

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