As an advocate of capital punishment (and corporal punishment), I feel obliged to respond to Sol Makgabutlane’s nuanced argument against the ultimate sentence in his Editor’s Note (The Star, October 22).
I will not rehash the pros and cons of the death penalty - Makgabutlane does an excellent job of that in his missive. In fact, given that South Africa is becoming a “mobocracy”, where supporters of the accused or defendant gather in mobs outside court rooms, and given the fact that there have been miscarriages of justice in our courts of law, the death penalty might not be such a good idea after all.
But there is a moral issue that cannot be ignored. A life sentence in this country, as one lawyer explained on 702 a while back, means 25 years in prison. Taking parole into account for good behaviour, this sentence effectively translates into a maximum of eight to 10 years in prison.
Is this the value we place on a person’s life in this country?
Makgabutlane acknowledges that we have had some “unspeakable” crimes in this country. My argument is that the retention of the death penalty in law is a symbolic act to underscore the value of human life. We cannot discuss capital punishment in a vacuum. We have to take the context into account and the context in our case is that we have become a lawless society.
If we remove the scales from our eyes and the wax from our ears, we will acknowledge this fact.
It is no coincidence that foreigners are committing crimes in South Africa for which they would be damned in their own countries - a case in point being the recent one of a Pakistani man in Durban who has tried to make a career of kidnapping the children of wealthy parents.
South Africa has indeed become a veritable haven for criminals.
In my view, the Constitutional Court has gone ahead of itself in revoking the death penalty and corporal punishment. This is not Canada or Sweden or Norway. There may come a time in this country when such barbaric forms of punishment may not be necessary, but now is not the time.
As long as we have people who think nothing of hiring hitmen to settle political scores as is the case in KwaZulu-Natal; as long as certain members of taxi associations simply kill people in disputes over taxi routes, as was the case a few days ago; as long as we have traditional healers who murder children for their body parts, and so on and so forth.
We have to acknowledge that our liberal Constitution has failed us.