PENALTY

TOWARDS A MORATORIUM
ON THE DEATH PENALTY
Paul Jacob Bhatti 1
Life is a precious gift from Almighty God, and only God has the right
to give it or take it away. There is no justice without life, and you can’t
appreciate life if you don’t reject death.
Some people believe that the death penalty is warranted under limited
circumstances and with the strictest procedural safeguards. But
even in the best jurisdictions, mistakes happen, evidence is incomplete,
and innocent people are erroneously executed.
In the worst jurisdictions, and there are many, the death penalty is
used by fanatics and fascists to purge innocent religious and political
minorities in the name of extremist ideologies and agendas. Due to
political strife, war, poverty and famine, the best jurisdictions can and
do devolve into the worst, making even well-reasoned death penalty
schemes a moral landmine.
For these reasons, I see no viable moral basis for capital punishment
to remain a sentencing option in any criminal justice system. The risk
and the injustice of losing innocent human life is too great.
I realize that implementing a moratorium on the death penalty is no
trivial matter. This is a complex question with no simple solutions. Providentially,
such a moratorium is now vigorously supported by a wide and
growing array of influential religious scholars, human rights activists and
political and social leaders. In the 1970s, some 20 countries had abolished
capital punishment. Today about 160 countries have stopped using it, either
by law or on a de facto basis. The momentum is palpable and energizing.
There is growing agreement that the essential objectives the
death penalty is meant to serve—crime control, deterrence and
1 Paul Jacob Bhatti is a surgeon and former Pakistani Minister for National Harmony and Minority
Affairs.
retribution—can be achieved without it, and are often not achieved
with it. And it is necessary to understand that the death penalty
causes loss of innocent human life in two ways: through mistakes and
through deliberate misuse.
First, our criminal justice systems are less than perfect. In many
jurisdictions, money and greed drive biased and corrupt tribunals
or kangaroo courts to adjudicate unjust convictions, resulting in the
imprisonment and execution of the innocent while the guilty rich
and powerful walk free.
Erroneous convictions also occur when poor and poorly educated
defendants cannot afford competent legal counsel, witnesses make
honest mistakes about identities and other facts of the case, evidence
is fabricated or suppressed, and juries are prejudiced or incompetent.
Convictions in these instances can result in the shedding of innocent
blood, an intolerable cost.
The United States is a country with a vigorous and venerable legal
tradition, known for its strong constitutional procedural safeguards
regulating the imposition of capital punishment. But even in this jurisdiction,
appellate courts have reversed numerous death sentences based
on procedural and evidentiary errors in the trial courts. A staggering
study by Columbia Law School reported on the exoneration of many
death row convicts using newly available DNA testing technology. 2
The work also underscores the high percentage of reversible errors in
death penalty sentences in the United States from 1973 to 1995.
In July 2013, the Washington Post reported that the Department of
Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation had agreed to review
thousands of cases in which hair sample analysis methods that modern
scientific assessments have deemed deeply flawed may have led to
wrongful convictions. More than 120 convictions have already been
reported as suspicious, including 27 death penalty convictions. 3 If
innocent people are being executed in the United States, a country
with vast legal and technical resources, the problem is likely to be
2 Jeffrey A. Fagan, Capital Punishment: Deterrent Effects and Capital Costs (New York, Columbia
University School of Law, 2014).
3 Spencer S. Hsu, “Convicted defendants left uninformed of forensic flaws found by Justice
Department”, Washington Post, 16 April 2012.
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