Death Penalty News

What historical literature can tell us about the cruelty of the death penalty Enlightenment thinker Cesare Boccaria wrote about the problems of state executions in “On Crime and Punishment” in 1764. It can take your money, steal your time, send you to war, but, my god, don’t let it kill you. We Americans are in a strange position of building highways, national parks, middle schools and electric chairs. The United States currently has 2,000 inmates on death row, which ought to prompt a moral emergency on the basis of repudiating human sacrifice and oppressive state power. The history of capital punishment is not confined to the vibrating bolt; gas chambers were introduced in the States in 1924 as a humane method of execution compared to hangings. Murdering prisoners is woven into American history. However, if the United States would have indulged WWI poet Wilfred Owen’s “ Dulce et Decorum Est ,” where he describes his comrades as drowning “under a green sea,” while fumbling to fasten o...

The time has come for liberals to use legislative majorities for one big thing George Orwell – he was Eric Blair then – went to Burma, today’s Myanmar, in 1922 to be an imperial policeman. After he returned, in 1927, he became a writer and in 1931 published a short sketch in The Adelphi magazine, “ A Hanging .” Told from the point of view of an imperial policeman in Burma, it begins with “a sodden morning of the rains” when a “sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard.” A condemned prisoner is led to the gallows. Once, “in spite of the men who gripped him... he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.” The policeman reflects: “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” In 1944, writing for the democratic ...

"Capital punishment is a macabre folly that swings between tragedy and idiocy. " The following text is an excerpt from: Abolishing the Death Penalty: Why India Should Say No to Capital Punishment ; Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Aleph Books; Rs 270. In its last and most defining and irreversible stage a death penalty case gets to be scrutinised for its wider, non-judicial ramifications, by politically wired brains. The death sentence when implemented is not a coin made of law’s pure gold but an alloy, in fact, a coarse alloy of many ores, of high, medium and low grade, that have passed through the smelteries of reason, emotion, pride, prejudice, a state’s hubris, a society’s moods that swing between pity for the victim and rage at the culprit in an unspooling of feelings that are as old as that of the Plebeians who ran amok in 44 BCE in Rome following Caesar’s assassination and killed Cinna the poet mistaking him for Cinna the assassin, the mob that bayed for Christ’s blood in...

Allen Foster In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” the luckless Winston Smith labors in a Ministry of Truth office where he “re-creates” the past by removing or changing historical documents to reflect Big Brother’s political demands. Winston doesn’t know whether he’s changing a fact or a fallacy another worker has already introduced. He erases some people entirely after the Party executes them. I couldn’t help but think of Smith’s grim legacy recently. Last month, I requested from the North Carolina State Archives a photograph of the first inmate executed by lethal gas. I’d first seen Allen Foster’s mug shot in a 2004 edition of the state’s authorized history journal and wanted a high-resolution copy. But the Archives – the state agency in charge of safeguarding the primary sources of our history – refused my request. I dug deeper. I discovered that the Archives is blocking access to all historical material related to executions. This is especially important at a time ...

90 years ago this month, an obscure English literary journal published the essay "A Hanging" by Eric Arthur Blair. It was among the earliest of the writings that would one day make Blair well-known to us, though chiefly by his pen name, George Orwell. "A Hanging" dealt with the execution of an obscure Indian - "a brown, sullen . . . puny wisp of a man with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes" - during Orwell's service as an imperial policeman in Burma during the 1920s. The essay's vivid prose, combined with the mundane details of the execution, makes it a powerful piece of writing, one that ultimately produces an unforgettable indictment of capital punishment with more impact than any editorial. The man featured in the essay has been condemned to death, but the reader is never told what his crime was. That detail might have confused matters and served to divert the reader's sympathy. "I watched a man hanged once," Orwell writes. ...

Alan Shadrake Alan Shadrake is the author of Once a jolly hangman , dissecting Singapore’s use of capital punishment, throwing up questions about the independence of Singapore's judiciary. For his pains, he was charged with contempt of court, found guilty (of course) and sentenced to six week’s imprisonment and a fine of S$20,000. After failing at appeal (of course, again) he served his sentence 1 June to 9 July 2011. I began the six weeks prison sentence on June 1. Because I couldn’t pay the fine, another two weeks were added. With remission for good behaviour this would mean five and a half weeks. I had been ordered to surrender to the sheriff at the Supreme Court at 9 a.m. and was quite looking forward to the experience as I defiantly told a Straits Times reporter who turned up mysteriously at a lively pre-jail party at The Old Brown Shoe, a British pub on Bukit Timah Road the night before. The words that headlined the report announced that I was going to have a ‘...

Alan Shadrake Alan Shadrake's book about the country's brutal judicial regime landed him with a six-week prison sentence there. What was the experience like? Alan Shadrake's career sparked into life when he uprooted his young family and relocated to Berlin shortly after the wall went up in 1961. Now the 76-year-old great-grandfather is enjoying a new lease of life after being imprisoned for writing a book that dared to criticise the judiciary in Singapore. (...) After his third wife died, Shadrake was just about to go to Cuba when a journalist friend phoned and asked him to write some travel stories about Singapore. So he flew to south-east Asia. On his only night off he was sitting alone at a bar when he met a Singaporean-Chinese woman who was to become his fourth wife. "The very morning I moved into her flat in Singapore I switched the TV on and there was an announcement about a British guy wanted for two murders who had run off to Australia," remembers Sh...

Alan Shadrake A lawyer says British author Alan Shadrake has been released from a Singaporean jail after serving 5 weeks for contempt of court. M. Ravi said Saturday his 76-year-old client was deported and flying to London after his release. Shadrake’s book is critical of Singapore’s use of the death penalty for crimes such as drug trafficking. He was jailed after Singapore’s High Court ruled that passages in his book titled “ Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock ” impugn the impartiality, integrity and independence of the judiciary. Shadrake was sentenced to 6 weeks in jail and an extra 2 weeks for failing to pay a 20,000 Singapore dollar ($16,400) fine. Ravi said he was released early for good behavior. Source : Associated Press, July 9, 2011 Related articles: Death Penalty News: Singapore: British writer  Alan Shadrake  starts  ... Jun 01, 2011 Alan Shadrake, 76, lost an appeal against his six-week sentence a...

Alan Shadrake At 76, Alan Shadrake knows the books he will be taking into solitary confinement if he is sent to Changi prison by Singapore's Appeals Court today - Rudyard Kipling's Kim, George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and a couple of his favourite H.G. Wells novels. Hardly the reading material of a dangerous subversive. Yet the veteran British journalist wasn't expecting to be arrested last year, let alone convicted, for ''scandalising Singapore's judiciary''. His crime? Writing a book, Once a Jolly Hangman, which began as a profile of Singapore's veteran hangman Darshan Singh - a character who once tried to get into the Guinness World Records book for having executed about 1000 people between 1959 and his retirement in 2006. But during the course of his research, Shadrake decided many of those people on Singh's gallows had been the victims of the city-state's flawed legal system. At Shadrake's trial i...