April 13
GHANA:
Introduce Death Penalty For Corrupt Officials - Dr. Kofi Amoah----Dr. Kofi said
the best way to combat corruption in Ghana is to execute persons who engage in
the act.
Renowned entrepreneur, Dr. Kofi Amoah, has stated that death penalty should be
introduced for persons found guilty of corruption.
According to him, although the suggestion seems harsh, it will serve as a
deterrent to others since the festering canker has eaten too much into the
Ghanaian society.
Speaking on Joy FM, Dr. Kofi Amoah said, "If you go into public office and
steal money, we must eliminate you like the Chinese do."
He added, "I'm sorry but that's how I feel ... we must give it a strong serious
attention."
"Anybody who is going to take the critical ingredient for our forward movement,
for the progress of our nation, to get to the shining city on the hill, the
future of Ghana, if they are going to take it from our mouths for their own
personal gain, we must eliminate them," he said.
Dr. Kofi Amoah believes any Ghanaian who goes to borrow or beg for money and
diverts part of that for their personal benefit must not be allowed to live
when found out.
"I know a lot of you will not agree with me, but that is my position," he
stressed.
"Ghana has no economy" since "we have to keep borrowing to pay our debt." He
described the borrowing spree as a "Ponzi scheme," he added.
Dr. Amoah said there is hope for the economy only if the government focuses on
building confidence in its own people.
"Ghana can become a bread basket of Africa instead of this hopeless basket case
we are going around borrowing with," he stated.
(source: pulse.com)
NEW ZEALAND:
25 Years After Abolishing the Death Penalty, New Zealand Is Safer Than Ever
The death penalty has been a consistent part of American life for decades.
In 2013, only 4 countries reported executing more convicts than the United
States - China, which kills thousands every year, led the way, with Iran, Iraq
and Saudi Arabia in its wake. The U.S. and Japan were the only liberal
democracies on Amnesty International's short list of countries who carried out
executions.
Despite compelling evidence the death penalty is an ineffective deterrent
against violent crime, applied disproportionately to minorities, often used on
wrongly convicted men and woman, and not, as supporters claim, a mostly
painless and "humane" exercise, 35 prisoners were given a lethal injection in
2014. One man, a murderer and rapist from Oklahoma, died of a heart attack 43
minutes after a botched execution left him "writhing" in view of civilian
witnesses and reporters. One of his veins, an official later explained, had
"exploded."
And yet, the majority of Americans - 63%, according to a Gallup survey from
October 2014 - say they support capital punishment as just desserts "for a
person convicted of murder." That number hasn't fallen below 60% since 1972,
and only 4 times in nearly 80 years of Gallup polling has it failed to achieve
the majority's backing.
Another path: Home to a Western-style democracy and capitalist free market
economy, New Zealand has not executed anyone since 1957. In 1989, the Kiwis
formally abolished the death penalty for all crimes, including treason.
"The death penalty violates the right to life and is the ultimate cruel and
inhuman punishment," Rebecca Emery, the campaigns director for Amnesty
International in New Zealand, told Mic in an email. "There is no evidence that
the death penalty has a greater deterrent effect on crime than terms of
imprisonment or any other punishment."
While there is deadly violent crime in New Zealand, it occurs at considerably
lower across-the-board rates than in the U.S. United Nations statistics show
that, between 2010 and 2012, an American was 5 times more likely to be murdered
than the average Kiwi. Overall crime rates in New Zealand in 2013 were their
lowest in the 24 years since abolition, Emery told Mic.
So what, if not the prospect of a date with the executioner, is driving down
the number of murders in New Zealand?
"Prevention" as the solution: In 2011, the country recorded a total of 34
killings, its lowest in a quarter-century. Police Deputy Commissioner Viv
Rickard credited "innovative campaigns, a focus on family violence and support
from partner agencies" as the driving factors, according to Stuff.
"We've had a real focus on prevention and we'll continue to do so," Rickard
told Radio New Zealand News. "We think we can stop crime; we think when we can
identify patterns, we can do something about it - and that's what we've been
doing. We've been putting our police officers back into neighborhoods, and
that's been welcomed by the public."
The concept is not a completely foreign one. American cities have for more than
2 decades invested in proactive policing practices. But as we have seen with
increasing clarity over the past 10 years, those policies have corrosive side
effects, especially in minority communities. The ubiquity of officers, whether
rolling through a neighborhood in a marked cruiser or plainclothes and carrying
out constitutionally dubious "stop and frisk" body searches, can take an unseen
toll, even as top-line crime rates taper.
"Prevention" takes a different tone in New Zealand. The country's "National
Operating Strategy," published in 2011 as part of a five-year plan to decrease
violent crime, focuses heavily on efforts to "improve our response to women and
children subjected to family violence by engaging more effectively internally,"
and through close engagement "between Family Violence coordinators, Child
Protection Teams and Pacific, Ethnic and Iwi liaison officers."
The Center for American Progress reported in 2014 that, between 2001 through
2012, "6,410 women were murdered in the United States by an intimate partner
using a gun - more than the total number of U.S. troops killed in action during
the entirety of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined."
The easy availability of firearms (the number of guns per household in the U.S.
is nearly four times the total in New Zealand), combined with a police culture
in the U.S. that's proven itself poorly suited to dealing effectively with
domestic violence, suggests significant reform is both necessary and unlikely
to come anytime soon.
The terrorism question: "The prospect of execution is unlikely to act as a
deterrent to people prepared to kill and injure for the sake of a political or
other ideology," Emery told Mic. "It has been repeatedly pointed out that those
who are executed can be perceived as martyrs whose memory becomes a rallying
point for their ideology or organizations."
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the recently convicted Boston Marathon bomber, went ahead
with his and brother Tamerlan's plot despite the possibility that he'd face the
federal death penalty in the aftermath. Tsarnaev's lawyers are working now to
spare his life, but the nature of the 21-year-old's arrest and the fate of his
brother suggests the prospect of death was not a prevailing concern.
The main perpetrator of the country's most deadly act of domestic terrorism -
only the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out by foreigners, killed more -
actively sought to die by the government's hand. After being sentenced to death
for his role in the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, which
killed 167 people (19 children among them), Timothy McVeigh told his lawyers to
drop their appeals and even lobbied unsuccessfully to have his June 11, 2011,
execution broadcast live.
An uphill fight: New Zealand's "Prevention First" manual also addresses
"understanding and responding to the drivers of crime" with particular urgency.
"Police will work with other agencies, service providers and the community,
particularly Maori, Pacific and ethnic groups, to address the underlying causes
of offending and victimization," the policy states.
But before these technocratic policy initiatives, however appealing, can take
hold, the conscience of a society must spur it to action. That cultural shift,
made decades earlier, is evident in the congruity between New Zealand's
activist community and its former prime minister.
"Experience shows that executions brutalize everyone involved in the process,
and nowhere has it been shown that the death penalty has any special power to
reduce crime or political violence," Amnesty's New Zealand executive director
Ced Simpson said in a statement on Oct. 10, 2007. That same day, then-Prime
Minister Helen Clark delivered a statement to the United Nations, declaring,
"Capital punishment is the ultimate form of cruel, inhuman and degrading
treatment."
In 2015, it's hard to imagine a U.S. president or high-powered public
office-holder saying the same. The bipartisan unwillingness to confront these
unpopular truths, along with the increasingly sadistic nature of the practice -
Utah's governor recently signed a law, which even he called "a little bit
gruesome," to bring back the firing squad - suggests that popular opinion,
however misguided, will win this day and many more to come.
Until then, it will be up to activists to continue making their case and, more
importantly, forging new alliances for what is sure to be a long fight. If they
are looking for a compelling new argument, New Zealand's story would be a good
place to start.
(source: policymic.com)
JAPAN:
Leprosy patient's execution questioned 50 years later
The murder trial more than half a century ago of Matsuo Fujimoto, a man
afflicted with leprosy, was a bizarre affair.
Due to fears of infection, court proceedings were virtually closed to the
public. The trial was not held in a courtroom but at an isolated,
government-run rehabilitation facility for leprosy patients, and evidence
materials were handled not by hand but with tongs. Fujimoto maintained his
innocence but was sentenced to death, with his attorney absent. The sentence
did not mention any specific reason for meting out the death penalty.
The convict was executed, at the age of 40 on Sept. 14, 1962, the day after his
third appeal for a retrial was rejected.
Lawyer Yasuyuki Tokuda, 70, asserts that the extraordinary circumstances of the
trial were a consequence of the government's "severe isolation policy" against
people with leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease.
Now, over 50 years after Fujimoto was executed, a group of lawyers and
supporters for leprosy patients have sought to file an application for a
posthumous retrial in the case. Tokuda, who believes Fujimoto was innocent, is
heading the group.
Fujimoto was born in 1922 to a poor farming family in a rural area of Kumamoto
Prefecture. His father died young, so his family could not afford to have him
receive a formal education following 2 years of elementary school.
Fujimoto is believed to have been diagnosed with leprosy when he underwent a
physical examination for conscription after the start of World War II. The
diagnosis, as well as an eyesight problem, apparently made him unfit for the
draft.
During the war, he was a valuable presence for his neighbors in a rural
community starved of young men who could be depended on when someone strong was
required to do heavy work, said Yasushi Shimura, an acquaintance of Fujimoto.
Toward the end of the war, Fujimoto married and the couple then had a daughter.
But his fortunes suddenly took a turn for the worse in 1950, when the municipal
office recommended he be admitted to an isolated facility for leprosy patients.
In a desperate attempt not to be consigned to the facility and to avoid the
stigma of leprosy, Fujimoto visited major hospitals to seek medical opinions
clearing him from the ignominy associated with the disease.
In August 1951, an explosion occurred at the home of the municipal official who
had recommended Fujimoto???s isolation. Fujimoto was arrested for attempted
murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison although he pleaded not guilty.
He escaped from prison in June 1952 while his appeal was pending. The following
month, the same official was found dead with dozens of stab wounds, and not
long afterward, Fujimoto was found and arrested.
The evidence against him was apparently not airtight.
No bloodstains were found either on a dagger alleged to have been used by him
in the murder or on the clothes he was presumed to have been wearing at the
time of the killing, according to Tokuda.
Fujimoto pleaded not guilty to all charges against him. But his attorney, who
was appointed by the state because he could not afford his own, agreed with all
the evidence presented by the prosecution. Conspicuously absent from Fujimoto's
sentencing - at which he was condemned to death - was his state-appointed
lawyer.
The case took place against a backdrop of persistent prejudice and
discrimination against leprosy patients and lingering misconceptions about the
disease. Leprosy is a chronic bacterial condition that mainly affects the skin
and nerves. But it is not highly contagious and is treatable. An effective drug
to treat the disease was developed in the U.S. in 1941 and at-home care
replaced isolated rehabilitation there as the preferred method of treatment.
And although the same drug was introduced in Japan in 1948, social ostracism
against leprosy patients continued and even grew as the government promoted
isolation under a law intended to contain the perceived threat of the disease.
An initiative to root out leprosy by confining patients to isolation swept
through the country, with more and more wards created in remote areas.
National Sanatorium Kikuchi Keifuen, where Fujimoto was held during his trial,
was expanded to accommodate an additional 1,000 patients. To fill vacancies in
the expanded rehabilitation facility, Kumamoto's administrative authorities
launched a campaign to hunt down leprosy patients.
Both Shimura and Tokuda point to that movement as a critical factor in
Fujimoto's case.
The government isolation policy officially ended in 1996 with the abolition of
the anti-leprosy law. In 2001, the Kumamoto District Court recognized that the
policy was unconstitutional and awarded damages to leprosy patients who sued
the central government.
"That was when the war ended for Hansen's disease patients at long last,"
Shimura said.
While Fujimoto's surviving family members have been reluctant to have his story
brought back into the spotlight, Tokuda said he will pursue the application for
a posthumous retrial, expressing outrage at the way the judicial system handled
the case.
"Unless this case is resolved, we lawyers can't be forgiven," he said.
(source: Japan Times)
SOLOMON ISLANDS:
Sorcery is not part of our laws
The country is not in a position to legislate on sorcery, Permanent Secretary
of the Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs Fred Mesa says.
He was speaking before the recent Public Accounts Committee (PAC) recently.
Mesa was answering questions from PAC as to whether the country has any plans
to include sorcery into its laws.
Mesa said his ministry was aware of increasing number of criminal cases in the
country that are sorcery-related.
However, he said they are not considering devising laws to deal with
allegations of sorcery.
"We recognized the use of bush medicines to treat illness as these are
traditional medicines that have been used for many generations in the past," he
said.
"But for any allegation of poison related to the practise of witchcraft, the
relevant authority is not prepared to include that in our legislations."
Just recently Papua New Guinea, which also recorded high incidences of
sorcery-related crimes, repealed its 1971 Sorcery Act.
PNG now treated sorcery-related killings as murder, and death penalty is now
the likely consequence for such offence.
Some International organisations highly condemned the allegation of sorcery,
saying that accusation of witchcraft were used to justify violence, usually
against women.
(source: Solomon Star News)
SAUDI ARABIA:
Beheadings: Saudi Arabia Quickens the Pace
Grainy video footage of a public execution in Saudi Arabia earlier this year
shows a woman on the floor begging for her life beneath her executioner. A man
dressed in white raises a sword above his head. The images shocked the world
and provided a sobering reminder of the kingdom's unwavering commitment to the
death penalty.
In Amnesty International's 2014 global report on the death penalty, released
April 1, 2015, Saudi Arabia once again ranks among the top 5 executioners in
the world. At least 90 people were executed in the kingdom in 2014. So far this
year, the authorities are well on track to surpass last year's annual execution
rate, with at least 54 people executed in the first 3 months of 2015.
Most death sentences in Saudi Arabia are carried out by beheading, often in
public. This gruesome execution method has driven the media to draw parallels
with the beheadings performed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
Yet the Saudi Arabian authorities have fiercely defended their own use of the
death penalty, arguing that far from being the brutal acts of a notorious armed
group, the executions are instead acts of justice, carried out in line with
Islamic traditions and religious law, known as Shariah, and only after the
strictest fair trial standards are upheld.
But is that true? Do cases of executions in 2014 support these claims? The
answer, Shariah experts would agree, is no.
For one thing, in a statement dated February 17, 2015, Saudi Arabia's Supreme
Court confirmed that sentences- including death sentences where the punishment
is left to the judge's discretion (a category that includes drug-related
offenses) - can be handed down even if it cannot be proved beyond reasonable
doubt that the suspect committed a crime. Suspicion, it seems, is enough for a
judge to order putting an end to someone's life.
Furthermore, under international law, "the most serious crimes" are the only
crimes for which the death penalty is allowed. In Saudi Arabia, however, 1/2 of
the announced executions in 2014, and so far in 2015, are for non-lethal
offenses, which do not fall into this category.
In 2014, the vast majority of executions for non-lethal crimes that took place
in Saudi Arabia were drug-related, including drug possession, with the
exception of 1 person executed for acts of "sorcery" and "witchcraft" - which
are not recognizable criminal offenses under international human rights law.
Under Shariah law, which is derived from the Koran and the words and deeds of
the Prophet Muhammad, which in turn form the basis of the constitution of Saudi
Arabia, certain crimes are punishable by the death penalty. Drug-related crimes
are not mentioned in these sources. Nor is there any mention of specific
methods of execution, such as beheadings, as punishment for crimes.
A closer look at 1 incident, the execution of four young men after a flawed
trial, reveals how profoundly problematic Saudi Arabia's use of the death
penalty really is.
On the morning of August 18, 2014, 2 sets of brothers from the same extended
family were executed in the southwestern city of Najran after being convicted
of "receiving large quantities of hashish." The 4 men's allegations that forced
"confessions" extracted under torture were used to sentence them had been
ignored.
Despite desperate last-minute appeals by members of their family, the
executions were carried out. Relatives who contacted Amnesty International to
ask for help to halt the executions received a phone call from Saudi Arabian
Ministry of Interior officials within hours warning them to stop contacting the
organization.
Neither the allegations that the 4 men had been tortured, nor the
authorities??? inability to prove that they were indeed guilty of trafficking
drugs saved them from the sword.
In the absence of reliable evidence for a drug-trafficking conviction, the
judge amended the charge, convicting them instead of "receiving" large
quantities of drugs. Neither charge meets the threshold of "the most serious
crimes" under international law.
This is far from an isolated incident. On May 27, 2014, when Ali al-Nimr, a
juvenile offender, was sentenced to death, the judge disregarded his torture
allegations and the fact that his "confession" appeared not to have been
handwritten by him. The judge also appeared to ignore the fact that Ali was
never allowed to see a lawyer. Executions of juvenile offenders are strictly
prohibited under international human rights law.
Saudi Arabia claims that it maintains the highest judicial standards in the use
of the death penalty, and depicts those calling for it to be abolished or
restricted, including Amnesty International and other organizations, as posing
a threat to Islam because they seek to persuade Saudi Arabians to renounce
Shariah law.
Such rhetoric by the authorities not only is bluntly false, but also fuels
dangerous misconceptions and antagonism among Saudi Arabians towards human
rights, international law and the West.
Saudi Arabia's authorities must stop deceiving people about the death penalty.
They should acknowledge once and for all that the death penalty is a cruel and
inhuman punishment that violates the right to life, and they should take steps
towards abolishing it entirely.
(source: Sevag Kechichian is Amnesty International's researcher on Saudi
Arabia----NEWSWEEK)
THAILAND:
Death in the Land of Smiles
There are as many ways to kill as there are to die. When it comes to
state-mandated executions, there are preferred methods that take place either
as messy public spectacles on scaffolds and squares or in private settings in
chairs and on gurneys, more clinical, therefore ostensibly more humane. Here in
Southeast Asia, state-funded killing is a mixed bag.
Cambodia abolished the death penalty in 1989; it was suspended in 2006 in the
Philippines, though it remains on the books. In 2014, Myanmar (Burma)
officially commuted all death sentences to life in prison.
In Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore, the condemned are hanged, though Brunei has
not executed anyone since 1957. In 2013, Malaysia had a per capita execution
rate of 1 execution per 9,433,333 persons. In 2014, Singapore had a per capita
rate of one execution per 2,495,000 persons.
The situation in Laos is murky. The compilers of Cornell University Law
School's online database DeathPenaltyWorldwide.org are "unsure whether Laos
applies a mandatory death penalty." While prisoners are still condemned to die,
there have been no confirmed executions since 1989.
In Indonesia, where executions resumed this year after a brief moratorium, the
situation is clearer: inmates are executed by firing squad. According to Death
Penalty Worldwide, "The prisoner has the choice of standing or sitting, and of
whether to have his eyes covered by a blindfold or hood. If following the
shooting the prisoner still shows signs of life, there is 1 final shot to the
head."
Vietnam also uses firing squads: "According to older reports, the prisoner is
tied to a wooden post and has his mouth stuffed with lemons. A firing squad of
5 to 7 people is called in. As the prisoner is dying, an officer fires a pistol
shot through the condemned's ear," reports Death Penalty Worldwide.
Since 2003, Thailand, the so-called "land of smiles", has used lethal
injection. Previously, the condemned were shot to death. The last shooting
execution took place on 11 December, 2002. The executioner was named Chavoret
Jaruboon. A remarkable biopic film about his life, aptly named The Last
Executioner, was released last year. To watch it is to venture not only to an
exotic land, but also into the agonizing soul of a musician, Buddhist, husband
and father, who was paid to kill people the State had decided should die.
A Brief History of Execution in the Land of Smiles
Chavoret was a guard at Bang Kwang Prison, the notorious "Bangkok Hilton". It
should be noted that his full-time job was as a guard and that his role as
executioner amounted to a part-time gig that he took for extra money. An entire
year could pass between 1 execution and another. For each he was paid 2,000
baht (roughly $60US at the current exchange). In total, from 1984 to 2002, he
executed 55 people.
Here's how the condemned were executed at Bang Kwang. They were led into a
small room where they were blindfolded then hog-tied to crossed beams, their
back facing the executioner. A screen was pulled between them, and the
attendant doctor fixed a black bull's eye printed on cardboard on it above the
prisoner's heart.
From 1935 to 1984, the weapon was a Bergmann MP 34/1 submachine gun, chambered
for 9mm parabellum rounds. The gun was fixed into position on a stand that
vaguely resembled a cotton-candy machine. After 1984, the more modern Heckler
and Koch MP-5, also chambered for 9mm, was used along with, and this is
peculiar, a silencer.
As Chavoret explains in his 2011 memoir with which the film shares a title,
"The Bergmann was very loud, and the bang usually freaked out the 2nd guy if
there was more than 1 execution. (With the silencer) I could even check the gun
was properly aimed by trying it out a couple of hours before the execution took
place."
A 3-man team managed each execution, with 1 aiming the gun after it had been
fixed in the stand, another holding a red flag, and a 3rd who pulled the
trigger when the flag dropped. Thai law mandated that 15 rounds were in the
gun's magazine, though fewer were usually required. Since the weapon is a
high-speed automatic, the number of bullets fired would be different each time,
so that 1 prisoner might receive 6 while the next would receive 8, and so on,
though apparently Chavoret usually fired in 3-round bursts. In the book, he is
very specific about how many rounds he fired at each execution (he counted the
ejected brass).
In effect, this created a 1-man firing squad. The ritualistic shooting team is
a holdover from the days when condemned prisoners were beheaded. In his book,
Chavoret admits: "I must say that I could have not have chopped off someone's
head with a sword - there is no way on earth I would have been able to do
that."
He also highlights the class system at work in the old days, when "if the
condemned was a member of the Royal Family or a high-ranking officer then a
better class of execution was required - they would be beaten to death with a
sweet-smelling stick."
Chavoret himself died of cancer in May 2012, age 64.
Interpolations and Interpretations
The Last Executioner had its global premiere at the 2014 Shanghai International
Film Festival, where it was only one of 15 films invited to compete for the
prestigious Golden Goblet Awards.
(source: popmatters.com)
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