[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

May 10



CANADA:

Extreme law always results in extreme injustice


"Extreme law always results in extreme injustice " ~ Cicero, "De Oficiis"


In its first 100 days the Harper administration revived pride in our
military through the Prime Ministers visit to our troops in Kandahar;
renewed purpose in our foreign policy by cutting off funding to the
Hamas-led government in the Palestinian Authority until it renounces
violence and recognizes Israel; and restored prudence in Canadas economic
affairs with a well-respected budget. It is therefore disappointing to see
it resort to pandering to the fear and ignorance of Canadians in its
justice policies presented last week.

The proposal for mandatory minimum sentencing is unjustified in fact and
in law. Almost all western jurisdictions have eliminated it. There is no
proof that it has any deterrent effect. And the costs associated with its
implementation would be better put into the hiring of more police officers
who, as "visible" deterrents, have proven time and again to be the most
effective resource in combating crime. This proposal, and its companion
piece which would severely reduce the conditional sentencing powers of
judges, are nothing more than politically motivated gestures that sound
good to the ears of the lowest common denominators among Canadians.

The impetus for the current proposals started over a year ago with the
murders of four RCMP officers in Alberta and continued through the Yonge
St. shooting of a young woman in Toronto. The deaths of the victims of
violent crimes will be all the more tragic if they produce a legacy of
national reaction for legal recidivism. Not every problem can be solved by
legislation. No politician should pretend it can and be allowed to put
into force straightjacket law. As Cicero wrote some 2000 years ago,
"Extreme law always results in extreme injustice."

According to police statistics 80% of all gun crimes are committed in
moments of passion or by hardened criminals. The latter will not be moved
by mandatory minimums. The former cannot be. Indeed just a day after these
proposals were announced, a police officer was shot to death in Windsor.
The only effect of mandatory minimums for gun and drug crimes, and the
unconditional sentencing provisions accompanying them, will be to
compromise compassion in our courts and reduce the resources for
rehabilitation in our penal system.

Canada today has 12,400 persons incarcerated in prisons. These new
proposals could see that number increase by 5,500. The federal government
has allocated $245 million for the construction of new prisons to handle
the increased prisoner population. That money would be better spent on
hiring more police officers at all levels.

The United States has the largest prison population in the world. This has
been the result of increased use of mandatory minimums. Yet violent crimes
have not been reduced to any significant degree on a national scale.
However, one of the few successful cases of an important reduction in gun
and drug crime has been New York City. Then Mayor Rudy Giuliani, himself a
former federal prosecutor, did not want more law. He rejected mandatory
minimums and unconditional sentencing. What he did do was increase the
police force from some 25,000 officers to 35,000. More police. More
patrols. More visible deterrence. More investigators. The result? Gun,
drug and violent crimes in New York have plummeted over the past 10 years.

The reason is clear enough. Any security expert will tell you that if you
want to protect your home, the first thing to invest in is not a
sophisticated electronic surveillance system that is invisible to the
naked eye. The biggest bang for the buck is to install a big horn right
over your front door. Criminals dont think about laws or deterrents they
cant see. They do think twice when they see 2-officer patrols instead of
one-officer cruisers, and regular half-hour oversight instead of hourly
tours. They think twice when they see a horn that could wake up the whole
neighbourhood. The officer in Windsor might not be dead today if he had
been partnered. He had time to return fire on the men who killed him.
Sadly, he was one gun against 2.

Rigorous law does not reduce crime. Enforcement authority and personnel
do. It is the same story with capital punishment. Those who kill, either
in the heat of passion or with professional pre-meditation, dont think
about laws. They dont think they are going to get caught. Among the
reasons is the sure knowledge that law-enforcement resources are strained
to capacity. The overwhelming number of murders and bank robberies are
never solved. It is interesting to note that there are only some
half-dozen countries outside the Islamic world that still enforce the
death penalty. And those countries -among them the United States, China,
Iran and North Korea - have the highest violent crime rates in the world.
Western European and Scandinavian nations that long ago eliminated the
death penalty, but kept the number of police officers at higher and ever
increasing levels, have the lowest rates of violent crime in the world.
The key is not more law. We have enough of that. They key is to have
enough personnel to deter, investigate and enforce.

Canada already has 29 offences that carry mandatory minimum sentences. 19
were added to the Criminal Code in 1995 as part of a package of changes
under the Chrtien administration. Many were for firearms offences. The
Harper governments proposals to add 19 new ones flies in the face of
reason and evidence. Canada has 1.9 violent deaths per 100,000 people. The
United States has 5.5 per 100,000 and the U.S. has had mandatory minimums
far longer than Canada. They have not worked down south while Canadas
violent-crime rates have been going down for decades. Even before the
Liberals 1995 additions.

This justice package is nothing more that what Jeffrey Simpson called
"pandering to perception". He cites Prof. Julian Roberts of Oxford
University who surveyed mandatory minimums for gun crimes in a range of
countries. Roberts concluded: "The studies that have examined the impact
of these laws reported variable effects on prison populations, and no
discernible effect on crime rates."

As for drug crimes, a worldwide study by Prof. Thomas Gabor of the
University of Ottawa and Nicole Crutcher of Carleton University concluded:
"Severe mandatory minimum sentencing seems to be least effective in
relation to drug offences. . . . Drug consumption and drug-related crime
seem to be unaffected, in any measurable way."

A 1999 report for the Department of the Solicitor-General concluded, after
surveying 50 studies involving 300,000 offenders, that "longer sentences
were not associated with reduced recidivism. In fact, the opposite was
found. Longer sentences were associated with a 3 % increase in
recidivism." As far back as 1952 the Canadian Sentencing Commission and
the Royal Commission on the Revision of the Criminal Code recommended
against them. Prisons become graduate schools for crime.

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Tories justice package is the
lengthening of sentences for drug crimes and removal of judges
prerogatives on conditionality. After some 13 years of Liberal government
that imposed layers of statocratic social engineering legislation on us,
we cannot afford to usher in a new era of Tory legislation regulating our
morality. Whether or not someone wants to take drugs is simply not the
states business. Its time to rollback a good part of the Criminal Code. It
is not the states role to impose virtue.

And that was the promise of the Harper campaign. Less government
interference in areas of private domain. Protecting you from me. Not
protecting me from me. This justice package does not auger well for that
promise.

This nation still seems to be caught up in the sweep of the new
prohibitionists. First to restrict, last to discuss. The dark-side of our
governors is that they engage in unbridled intervention to punish the
governed into virtuous conduct. And that should be nobodys business.
Liberal or Conservative.

(source: Canada Free Press - Beryl P. Wajsman is the president of the
Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal)






MOROCCO:

Morocco Inmates Discuss Life Behind Bars


"This is Omar Maarouf calling from Kenitra Central Prison," said the
dejected voice on the other end of the line.

The bizarre phone call was the second in 2 days from a prisoner inside the
high-walled Kenitra, one of Morocco's most notorious lockups. It holds
several death row inmates like Maarouf, who the government links to
violent Islamic groups.

Fellow prisoner Abdelkebir Goumarra, serving a life sentence at Kenitra,
called a day earlier, also without notice.

More disturbing than receiving such calls was the idea that high-security
prisoners were able to use cell phones at one of the country's most
restrictive prisons. But Goumarra said the 80 high-security prisoners at
Kenitra mingle with other inmates, so he borrowed a cell phone.

He got this reporter's number from his wife, who had been interviewed
earlier.

Goumarra, a Moroccan, and Maarouf, who has dual Danish-Moroccan
citizenship, are accused of belonging to Salafiya Jihadiya, the name used
by the government for the Islamic group blamed for the May 2003 suicide
bombings in Casablanca that killed 33 people. Up to 3,000 people were
arrested after the blasts.

Maarouf was already in prison and sentenced to death in connection with
attacks carried out before the Casablanca blasts. Islamic radicals are
seeking to overthrow Morocco's monarchy and replace it with Islamic rule.

Goumarra, 36, surrendered to police four days after the bombings, after a
warrant was issued and his picture appeared on television.

The men said in separate telephone interviews last week that they were
innocent. Their only crime, they said, was having beards, wearing long
robes that fall above the ankle typically worn by Taliban militants in
Afghanistan, and praying in mosques.

"Maybe they found my number on one of the militants?" speculated Maarouf,
adding that he is related to an imprisoned Islamic radical.

Human rights groups say many of those arrested for the Casablanca bombings
had no connection to it.

Philip Luther of the London-based Amnesty International said the trials -
especially those in the summer of 2003 - were conducted at breakneck
speed. Defense lawyers complained they were not allowed to present
witnesses and of government interference.

But Mohammed Lididi, a senior official at the Justice Ministry, said there
was no mistake. "You will never find anyone in prison who will confess to
his guilt. They all claim they are innocent."

Lididi said prisoners are not allowed cell phones, but "like any prison in
the world, things do get smuggled into prison, including cell phones and
drugs."

He said Morocco enjoyed an independent and just judiciary.

On the phone, the men described ordeals that were brutal and unexpected.

Goumarra said after he surrendered he was handcuffed, blindfolded and a
sack placed on his head. He was held in secret detention, where he was
"physically and psychologically tortured for seven days and nights," he
said.

He was stripped of his clothes, made to sit on a Coke bottle and tortured
"in sensitive areas of the body," he said. Interrogators also put his head
in water and burned cigarettes on his body, he said.

Human rights groups say prisoners are routinely held in secret detentions
and subjected to mistreatment - and sometime torture - while under
interrogation in Morocco.

Later, in Casablanca, Goumarra said he was made to sign a document even
though he cannot read.

Left behind were 2 of Goumarra's three wives with their five children in
the house he built in Sidi Taibi, a shantytown south of Kenitra. A 3rd
wife lives in the capital's twin city, Sale, with her 3-year-old twin
sons.

"I don't know what my man has done. If he killed, why don't they tell me
who?" asked Fatiha Rahmouni, 30, Goumarra's second wife, revealing only
her brown eyes through a slit in a black veil covering her face. Unlike
the Islamic radicals who trained in Afghanistan or studied in radical
religious schools in Pakistan, her husband has never left Morocco, she
said.

Maarouf, whose wife and four children live in Denmark, was linked in 1998
by Belgian police to the extremist Algerian Armed Islamic Group.

Maarouf said he was "kidnapped" by Moroccan police in early 2003 as he
arrived from Europe and was taken to a detention center in Tamara, south
of Rabat.

In July 2003, he was sentenced to death. The Danish government has
protested, but Morocco does not recognize dual nationality and considers
Maarouf a Moroccan.

In the telephone interview, Maarouf introduced himself as the media
representative of 56 Kenitra prisoners accused of belonging to the
Salafiya Jihadiya. He said he issues statements to the Moroccan media via
telephone or through prisoners' families.

He said he also was among 57 prisoners who began a hunger strike on May 2,
demanding their cases be reopened because they had been fabricated.

"Everyone knows they were doing it under American pressures," said
Goumarra, who said he is also refusing to eat.

"We've asked our families to bring us (burial) shrouds. We will either
leave jail alive or in shrouds," said Maarouf. The wives of the prisoners
plan a sit-down strike outside the prison May 16, the anniversary of the
Casablanca bombings, said Rahmouni.

Asked how he passes the time, Maarouf, said: "What can I tell you sister?
There's only despair in prison."

Prisons in Morocco are often overcrowded, and there are 1,700 men at
Kenitra. Former inmates say the prison, with its high yellow stone walls
and four towers, is cold all year round.

While 20 men are on death row, Morocco has not carried out an execution
since 1993.

"I wish they would relieve me," said Maarouf, referring to his execution.

Then he added: "But we are optimistic. We expect a happy outcome. The
government made many mistakes. It rushed into things. It turned into a
theater."

"Regarding execution, they don't carry out death sentences in Morocco.
They are now waiting .... "

The line went dead.

(source:  Associated Press)