PENALTY

led to resurgence in support for the death penalty. She points to the dangers
that inflamed public passions can pose to fair trials, as well as the way that
high-profile trials can further inflame divisive emotions, and describes how
many women’s groups reject the notion that the death penalty should be
imposed in their name for the crime of rape.
Alice Mogwe, executive director of DITSHWANELO, the Botswana Centre
for Human Rights, examines the status of the death penalty in Botswana,
in the context of the African human rights architecture. The death penalty
remains on the books in Botswana and is mandatory for murder unless
there are extenuating circumstances. She examines the barriers faced by poor
people and members of ethnic and linguistic minorities in Botswana’s justice
system—including inadequate representation, lack of translation services in
this multilingual country and secrecy surrounding the clemency process—and
supports the call by the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights
for a moratorium on the death penalty.
Innocent Maja, a lawyer and a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, analyses
the extent to which Zimbabwe has implemented the United Nations
General Assembly resolution on the moratorium on the use of the death penalty.
Although there is no official moratorium, Zimbabwe has not carried out
an execution since 2004. The country’s 2013 Constitution severely limits the
circumstances in which a death penalty could be imposed, and there is currently
no death penalty law on the books that meets those criteria. But shortcomings
in the legal system—from the paucity of legal aid for indigent defendants to
appalling conditions for death-row prisoners—as well as the fact that Zimbabwe
has paused and resumed executions before, call for a more final and formal
end to the death penalty.
Arif Bulkan, an academic from Trinidad and Tobago, analyses the application
of the death penalty in the Commonwealth Caribbean. While the death
penalty has not been abolished there, its use has been limited by a series of
appeals-court rulings focusing on how it is carried out—for example, limiting
how long a prisoner can be kept on death row, making the pardons process more
accessible and transparent, enabling petitions to international treaty bodies, and
challenging mandatory sentencing. Despite these limits, severe problems in the
legal system—including failure to assess defendants’ mental and psychological
status, the poor quality of legal aid for indigent prisoners, and a low clearance
rate in murder investigations—combine to make the pattern of death sentences
that still do occur tragically arbitrary and useless as a deterrent.
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THE TERRORS OF PRISON
FADE SLOWLY
Damien Echols 1
When I first arrived on death row, the guards decided they were
going to welcome me to the neighbourhood. So they took me to
the part of the prison they call The Hole. It’s a very small, dark, filthy
place that’s in complete isolation. And for the next 18 days they beat
the hell out of me. They used to come in at about twelve or one
o’clock in the morning, and they would chain me to the bars of
the cell and beat me with nightsticks. They beat me so badly at one
point that I started to piss blood. I still wake up at night sometimes
dreaming that I’m pissing blood again.
They starved me. They tortured me.
Eventually word of what they were doing started to leak out into
the rest of the prison. Other prisoners started to hear about it. So
they went to a deacon from the Catholic Church, who used to
come to prison to bring Catholic inmates communion, and they
told him what was going on. And he went to the warden’s office,
and he told the warden, “I know what you’re doing to this guy.
I know you’re killing him. And if it doesn’t stop, I’m going to
go public.”
So that night they took me out of The Hole and put me back in a regular
prison cell. The other prisoners told me later that they had expected to
see me carried out in a body bag any day. And I think the only reason
they didn’t murder me is because they realized they were being watched.
When I was a kid my family was beyond dirt poor. When we finally
moved into a trailer park with running water and electricity, we
thought we were really moving up in the world. I used to take refuge
in books and music. Reading became a sanctuary for me. It allowed
me to escape the world I lived in for a little while.
1 Damien Echols spent 18 years on death row for a crime he did not commit.
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