HUMAN RIGHTS FEATURES
(Voice of the Asia-Pacific Human Rights Network)
(A joint initiative of SAHRDC and HRDC)
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August 18
Hang Our Heads in Shame
The recent execution of Dhananjoy Chatterjee following the dismissal of a
last ditch attempt to save his life calls for some introspection from all
concerned. The human rights community, the legal profession and the
judiciary all have a heavy cross to bear.
Other actors in this sordid episode of judicial murder have not covered
themselves with glory either. The Marxist Communist rulers in West Bengal,
and the Church of North India, in particular, have demonstrated utter
contempt for their own founding principles and their stated beliefs and
ideologies, one by vociferously espousing an un-Marxist idea and the other
by remaining silent.
The Church of North India first.
After a prolonged delay in the execution of his original sentence in 1991,
Chatterjee=92s death sentence reappeared before the public's eyes this year=
,
as various legal initiatives were launched to commute the sentence. The
victim of the crime was a student of Kolkata's Welland Gouldsmith School
functioning under the auspices of the West Bengal diocese of the Church
North India. When the media began to cover this case, Ms. Gillian D=92Costa
Hart, principal of Welland Gouldsmith school on numerous occasions publicly
condemned the brutality of Chatterjee's crime and spoke out vehemently in
favour of the death sentence as the appropriate punishment. Hart told the
Hindustan Times that "[t]he stay order [of Chatterjee=92s execution] is
shocking. When Hetal was crying for mercy, did anybody hear her? We thought
she would get justice." She was also quoted on a television channel
stating that "[e]verybody, all the students, raised their hands when I
asked them whether Dhananjoy Chatterjee should be hanged or not,"
purportedly representing the unanimous sentiment within the school.
Hart's remarks advocating the death penalty are extremely troublesome
because her message appears to uphold aspects of the criminal justice syste=
m
that are founded on vengeance. These ideas violate human sanctity and are
contrary to the principles of mercy and forgiveness of the Christian
tradition. It is therefore surprising that the Church has not found it fit
to rein Ms. Hart's obvious attempts to inculcate ideas of retributive
justice in young minds.
The Church of England as well as the World Council of Churches, which the
Church of North India is a member of, holds an unequivocal position against
the death penalty. The General Synod, representing the Church of England's
official view, pronounced on the death penalty issue in 1983, "[t]hat this
Synod would deplore the reintroduction of capital punishment into the Unite=
d
Kingdom sentencing policy," and it has not changed the policy since then.
The World Council of Churches demonstrated its firm conviction against the
death penalty in a letter to the US Governor George Ryan, commending his
order to commute all death sentences in Illinois in 2003: "The capital
punishment operates against the Christian principles of compassion, love an=
d
forgiveness. To promote the abolition of capital punishment is an expressio=
n
of Christian belief in the sanctity of life." The Church of North India
continues to maintain a silence on the issue. Are we to assume then that it
subscribes to Ms. Hart's views?
Another important concern for the current situation is the lack of moral
leadership shown by the Anglican Church in India, and West Bengal in
particular, in guiding its adherents on this critical social issue. The
Anglican Church in various parts of the world has been a voice of
socially-conscious religious leaders. The Anglican Church of Canada had bee=
n
actively involved in opposing the 1987 reinstatement attempt of capital
punishment in Canada. In the United States, the Anglican Bishop of Oklahoma=
,
the Rt Rev Robert Moody actively advocated a moratorium on the death penalt=
y
in 2001 when 11 people were executed in Oklahoma. Bishop Frank Griswold, th=
e
Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal (Anglican) Church of the US, criticised
the execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2001 stating that "[a] public ritual
of death can only coarsen our spirits and deaden our sensibilities. Though
undoubtedly Timothy McVeigh committed one of the most heinous crimes in the
history of our country, I fear that execution as spectacle can only poison
the soul of our nation."
The Bishop of Kolkata and the Church of North India have clearly failed to
exercise their moral leadership by taking a strong stance against the death
penalty and reproving Ms. Hart's statements. As an educator, moreover, it
was Ms. Hart's duty to encourage a debate on this critical issue and supply
both sides of the argument. Instead, she asked a black-or-white question an=
d
demanded a show of hands without urging the girls to reflect on it. And the
answer apparently settled the issue. It must be asked if the Anglican Churc=
h
wishes the students under its tutelage to imbibe such values, and worse,
have them answer crucial questions without reflection.
The judiciary and the legal fraternity
The judicial process is not infallible.
The Indian criminal justice system has not been able to cope with the weigh=
t
of an immense caseload, the lack of resources and the vital needs of the
most impoverished criminal defendants. One major problem with the system is
that poor and illiterate defendants generally do not have access to adequat=
e
legal assistance. For example, due to limited amount funding for legal aid,
legal aid lawyers, even if experienced, can spend only a limited amount of
time preparing a defence, and mistakes made by defence lawyers at trial
cannot generally be corrected on appeal
Admittedly, these concerns are not necessarily cause for suspending the
criminal justice system altogether, but in the case of the death penalty,
the obligation for suspending executions is different. Because failure to
strictly adhere to the standards of procedural fairness may have such
catastrophic consequences in these cases, the death penalty should be
suspended until the Government is able to rectify gross problems concerning
fairness within the system.
Indeed, as many commentators have observed, under the present system, court=
s
have disproportionately sentenced poor and uneducated defendants to death.
Justice Bhagwati, in his 1980 dissenting judgment in Bachan Singh, wrote:
There can be no doubt that death penalty in its actual operation is
discriminatory for it strikes mostly against the poor and deprived sections
of the community [,] and the rich and the affluent usually escape from its
clutches.
And finally, West Bengal's Stalinists
"We want him hanged," declared Comrade Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the Marxist
Communist Chief Minister of the state of West Bengal.
It is evident that the Kolkata Communist has more in common with Stalin tha=
n
with Marx. The Indian Marxists' preoccupation about a correct rendering of
Indian history notwithstanding, they seem to have forgotten the revolution
of 1917. "Down with the Death Penalty!" was the cry in Moscow before
February 1917. The words were emblazoned on the red flags and when the Tsar
abdicated in February 1917, the death penalty was abolished.
Perhaps West Bengal's communists need to be reminded of Marx's statement on
capital punishment in a short article he published in the New York Daily
Tribune in 1853 (Cain and Hunt (eds.) 1979: 193-196). After stating that
"it would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish
any principle upon which the justice or expediency of capital punishment
could be found in a society glorying in its civilization," he criticised
proponents of the death penalty like Kant and Hegel for giving
"transcendental sanction to the rules of existing society". He concluded th=
e
article with the following rhetorical question: "Is there not a necessity
for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these
crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals t=
o
make room only for the supply of new ones?"
Clearly, all of us - human rights activists, teachers, legal professionals,
the judiciary, Christians, Marxists and all those who would like to see
civilization evolve rather than degenerate - need to do some introspection.
The noose around our basic human values is getting tighter.
- Human Rights Features
Ravi Nair
For the Editorial Collective
