Johannesburg - The death penalty could deter brutal crimes in South Africa, where almost 500 000 people have been murdered since 1994.
Based on an analysis of annual SAPS crime statistics, many others have been injured and traumatised.
The South African Institute of Race Relations released a report on Tuesday that focused on whether capital punishment should be reinstated, after the Constitutional Court abolished it 21 years ago.
The SAIRR found that crime in the country could be characterised as cruel and violent.
The organisation cited the Rhodes Park murder and rape case as an example.
Three men are on trial for allegedly murdering two men and sexually assaulting and raping their partners.
The two couples were taking a stroll in the Kensington park in October last year when the gang pounced.
SAIRR chief executive Dr Frans Cronjé said its board members were approached by various interest groups and those in the field of criminal justice to study whether the death penalty was a viable solution to South Africa’s high violent crime level.
“We were asked to look into the death penalty as a way to deter the most cruel and violent crimes, such as the Rhodes Park murders. These are crimes characterised by gratuitous violence in which victims are tortured, family members raped or executed in front of their loved ones, and children harmed,” he said.
Cronjé said the perpetrators in those types of cases went beyond the violence needed to execute the robbery or whatever initially motivated the crime.
“The examples are frightening: women tortured by having kettles of boiling water thrown over them, people burnt with irons or on stove tops, families executed.”
The SAIRR said that while compiling the report, it managed to overcome certain objections in favour of reinstating the death penalty. These included whether the death penalty was cruel and unusual, a form of retribution, arbitrary, and that it didn’t serve as a deterrent.
The institute said that according to its research, capital punishment wasn’t necessarily cruel and unusual, society was entitled to a measure of retribution, and arbitrariness wasn’t unique to that form of punishment.
It added that although international evidence was mixed, in the South African context the death penalty could be a deterrent to the commission of the most cruel and violent of crimes.
The SAIRR found that the most compelling argument against the death penalty was the possibility of error, particularly in the case of the criminal justice system.
It concluded that while a case could be made to reopen a debate into the death penalty, the issue of whether an irreversible error could be made would have to be overcome.
The Institute for Security Studies (ISS) said there was no substantial evidence showing that the death penalty deterred perpetrators from committing serious crimes.
ISS governance, crime and justice division head Gareth Newham said the certainty of criminals getting caught and punished could possibility stop them from committing, and not necessarily capital punishment.
SAPS spokesperson Brigadier Selvy Mohlala said police couldn’t deviate from the constitution, which prohibited the death penalty.
The SAPS doesn’t keep more than 10 years of statistics on its website, but they indicate there were about 174 000 murders from April 2006 to March this year.
Other sources, based on SAPS stats, indicated that more than 270 000 people were murdered in the 12 years before that, giving a total of about 445 000 murders over the past 22 years.
The argument against was the possibility of an irreversible error.
The Star