Time to abolish the death penalty in Nigeria

There is something intrinsically immoral and debasing about state sanctioned taking of human life in the name of justice. Capital punishment presupposes infallibility on the part of the state, and certainty of guilt on the part of the convict. In documenting and presenting information in cases involving capital punishment, the news media often tend to subliminally stoke public anger and sense of societal revulsion against the defendant, thus attracting and sustaining interest in the news. Often therefore this societal yarn for justice forms the raison d’être for most convictions, and preys into our primordial animal “rush” of intrigue and excitement at the thought of a “deserved justice for the criminal”. Societal vengeance therefore remains the most compelling reason for retaining a practice which originated in the dark ages, and the continued practice of which had been proven ineffective at deterrence.

Research after research proves that thorough justice (which should prevent recurrence) is lost in these state sanctioned executions because, in some of these cases, the state zealously and sometimes deviously seeks to convict and mostly rely on mob logic in determining guilt. If the public agrees in the guilty verdict, then the verdict must be right; but, history teaches us that a nation of millions of people can be wrong on a particular issue. As the human family advances in knowledge and in understanding of ourselves as humans, and our position in the earth, capital punishment is increasingly being linked with barbarism. The aims of societal sense of decency must be pursued with greater zeal if we must successfully reverse course; there has to be a better and less debasing path to justice. This article does not call for anarchy nor does it call for a blanket exoneration of the guilty. It simply raises issues of societal decency which are impugned by the application of state sponsored murder. The case against the death penalty is also bolstered by recent developments, whereby previously convicted “murderers” where exonerated by the new science based evidence of DNA. These exonerations were recorded in developed countries with high levels of technologies, and methodologies for capital punishment trials, thus showing that even such judicial systems are not infallible. The urgency of revisiting the implementation of capital punishment in a developing country like Nigeria therefore cannot be overemphasized.

In the United States, a total of 200 people had been exonerated by April 2007 using DNA evidence. The first inmate to be exonerated was David Vasquez who was convicted in 1984 for the rape and murder of a young woman in Arlington Virginia. Vasquez had confessed to the crime and was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He had spent 5 years in prison when he was exonerated in 1989. Of the 200 who were subsequently cleared, all had spent an average of 12 years before exoneration by DNA evidence. Eighty-eight (88%) percent were convicted of sexual assault; 28 percent of murder. Fourteen were on death row. Since the Vasquez exoneration, increasing numbers of convictions have been determined to be erroneous, and common methods of gathering evidence including confessions and eye witnesses are coming under closer scrutiny. In the 200 cases, it was discovered that often more than one factor led to the convictions. According to the New York Times: “Three-quarters were marked by inaccurate eyewitness identification, and in two-thirds, there were mistakes or other problems with the forensic science. Fifteen percent featured testimony by informants at odds with the later evidence. There were confessions or admissions in about 25 percent of the cases. In about 4 percent, the people had pleaded guilty.” See pictures of exonerated convicts here

The most disturbing point of these exonerations is that a solid 29 percent admitted guilt when in fact they were innocent. That goes to show that the methods for extracting confessions and gathering of evidence, which are fairly similar in most law enforcement systems of the world are seriously flawed and as such cannot be trusted with issues of life and death which the capital punishment trials represent. In a third world country like Nigeria, this assumes even a more disturbing dimension. Amnesty International, the global human rights watchdog has consistently listed Nigeria as having one of the most repressive judicial systems in the world. Extra judicial killings of crime suspects by the Nigerian security have been recorded by civil rights groups in Nigeria.

In Africa and the world, several countries have abolished, or are on the path to abolishing the death penalty. These include: the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Senegal, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Central American nations, Paraguay and Uruguay. Many other nations in Africa and the world including Russia and the old Soviet republics have in practice stopped executions and hopes are rising that such nations would eventually stop the barbarian practice. It is instructive that the African nations which retain capital punishment are some of the most repressive regimes: Cameroun, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Nigeria should be embarrassed to be equally yoked with these nations in the practice of judicial murder.

Even in developed nations still grappling with capital punishment, the tide is gradually shifting to the side of abolition. In the United States for instance, murder trials have been severally reformed to stamp out errors in convictions, and many states are currently reviewing their capital punishment statutes. Murder trials in Nigeria have remained essentially the same since independence from Great Britain in 1960. Murder trails in the Nigerian context still cannot be said to meet modern standards of justice because judges still base most of their judgments on societal sentiments; they tend to be beholden to the “moral sway” of society. Though the forensic science infrastructure of the Nigerian police has been improved a lot, other evidence gathering and presentation mechanisms are still hindered by the general lack of infrastructural and training facilities in Nigeria. While the Nigerian police might need huge resources to aid crime detection and evidence management, the Nigerian judiciary needs massive reforms and a complete reorientation to meet the challenges of modern dispensation of justice.

These challenges cannot be met overnight; but while we grapple with them, innocent citizens are being convicted and sentenced to death. The Nigerian prison population is comparatively low; standing at about 46,000 inmates out of a population of 150 million Nigerians (some nations of the west have about 1% of their population in jail). The result is that murder convicts spend years and sometimes decades in death row. The delay in executions is also caused by the increasing scarcity of executioners in the Nigerian prisons systems. In other words, the global campaign against judicial murder may be gaining some foothold in Nigeria already, and that is good. However, this adds to the already existing problem of congestion in the Nigerian prison system, with some prisons housing four times the planned prisoner population. Some convicted prisoners have died in prison before their scheduled executions. In light of this reality, there is no doubt that innocent convicts must have been executed in Nigeria.

Our duty as a society is to ensure that our laws work and that our humanity is not debased even as we pursue justice. There are no scientific proofs showing that capital punishment deters violent crimes which lead to murder. Often the perpetrators of these crime act out of passion which has nothing to do with logical thought and sound premeditation. That is why in nations with capital punishment, incidents of violent crime and murder persist and sometimes surpass those of societies without capital punishment laws. Even in the United States, violent crimes occur mostly in states with capital punishment laws.

Nigeria is a leading nation in Africa and our laws must not lag behind those of nations we ought to be leading. Much of our current laws are impositions from military dictatorships of the past. Modernizing the Nigerian society should be one of the dividends of democracy, and the challenge should be our collective responsibility as a nation. What we urgently need in Nigeria is the construction of more prisons as well as the modernization and reform of our institutions of justice. There should be an immediate moratorium on executions in Nigeria.

Tags: Some convicted prisoners have died in prison before their scheduled executions. In light of this reality, there is no doubt that innocent convicts must have been executed in Nigeria.