Dear Editor,

Perhaps it was a good thing that Audley Shaw and Michael Peart were at that funeral together giving their views on jungle justice. For, while Shaw was busy correcting Peart on the error of his ways in “accidentally” supporting jungle justice by calling for a resumption of hanging, interestingly and ironically he provided the best reasons why hanging should never resume.

Shaw correctly pointed out that if jungle justice had been served on the man initially accused by the residents, an innocent man would have been lynched, as it turned out that the second man held was the true culprit. How would the residents have felt if they eventually found out that an innocent man was killed?

What Shaw forgot to tell the obviously very angry crowd at that funeral when they praised him for his call for a resumption of hanging is that many innocent people have had their necks stretched. In this respect, hanging is just as bad as jungle justice.

One of the reasons so many countries are abandoning capital punishment is that it doesn’t serve any useful purpose. It clearly has not served as any real deterrent to crime. Also, killing the condemned person will not bring his victim back. It certainly will not deny the condemned person the one thing he, and the rest of us, are sure of — death.

Our justice system is certainly not perfect. However, while we can compensate innocent people who have been wrongly convicted, we can’t do so for persons who have been wrongfully hanged. The finality of hanging denies us the ability to compensate as we can’t bring the dead back to life. As long as there is the strong possibility that the innocent can be executed, the death penalty must be avoided.

However, I don’t want to not provide an alternative to the death penalty, as truly guilty people, so convicted, should be made to pay. In this respect, I would like to offer two suggestions:

First, they should really be made to work. Put them to some real work like building roads and repairing public facilities like schools and hospitals. Surely, we can save a lot of the money that we pay others to work on large public work projects like these.

Secondly, we should give serious consideration to making it mandatory that once persons have been convicted for a capital crime, their bodies must become the property of the State. In this regard, we should use then as a source for organs. A man can still live on one kidney. The State should also have the right to be able to use these convicts for scientific experiments. Why use rats when we have humans?

I know this sounds barbaric, but which is worse — being able to compensate a living man who has been deprived of some of his organs or being unable to compensate a man who has been killed?

We need to think outside of the box. The death penalty should be done away with as it does not work.

Michael A Dingwall

michael_a_dingwall@hotmail.com