Mistaken (political) identity in execution

SINCE THE Copenhagen climate talks failed to produce a binding agreement there has been a clamour of voices attacking the Chinese government for supposedly ‘sabotaging’ the process – who knew, though, that the talks’ failure would lead to the execution of a mentally ill man convicted of drug dealing?

Today, anti-China sentiment finally reached fever-pitch. Philip Honour, a young activist who occasionally contributes to the Guardian newspaper in Britain, wrote on LabourList, a prominent British Labour party web site, that the Chinese government executed the British man Akmal Shaikh because it has been criticised by foreign diplomats. “The Chinese choose to respond by orchestrating an execution that they may have knowingly carried out with the intention of generating a diplomatic incident,” he wrote. (1)

This bizarre and paranoid fantasy is China-bashing at its worst.

There is no need to construct a sinister conspiracy theory in order to condemn the use of capital punishment, especially given that executions, both judicial and extra-judicial, are carried out across the world – and in plenty of countries that aren’t authoritarian dictatorships.

China is just one of 58 states that currently sanctions the death penalty, among them Iran and Saudi Arabia – as well as the United States and Japan.

Much criticism surrounding the death penalty is, rightly, focussed on the United States but one of the most repugnant death penalty regimes is that of Japan. Japan, an otherwise modern, civilised society has a notoriously secretive system of state-sanctioned murder: condemned prisoners are not allowed to speak to anyone except family members and even this right is often denied them. They are kept in solitary confinement and watched 24 hours a day using CCTV. Exercise is limited to just two 30 minute sessions a week in summer months and three in winter and is performed alone, save for a guard, in a two metre by five metre concrete bunker. Prisoners must sit during all waking hours spent in their cells and are punished for moving. Any voluntary work undertaken by a prisoner must be performed seated in the cell.

In addition, during the trial prisoners are kept to a strict time schedule that does not allow them any time to prepare for court. Failure to adhere to the schedule results in punishment.

After confirmation of the death sentence, the prisoner is not informed of the date of their execution. One morning they are simply walked out of their cell, informed their execution is to be carried out, brought to the execution chamber and given a few moments to write a will before being handcuffed, blindfolded and then hanged.

As death sentences are carried out, on average, six to seven years after being handed-down prisoners spend this amount of time dreading every single morning. If the prison guard who walks down the corridor every morning stops outside the prisoner’s cell then he or she knows that this only means one thing: they are about to die.

An average death by hanging in Japanese prisons takes fifteen to twenty minutes – literally this long hanging by the neck from a rope.

The condemned’s family and legal team are informed of the execution a day after it has occurred.

According to the Japanese government, the secrecy and failure to give the prisoner any indication of when they are to be killed is done in the name of sparing them the emotional turmoil of facing-up to death.

It is worth noting that Japanese courts have no juries – all decisions are taken by judges. A not unconnected fact that is Japanese criminal courts have a staggering 99 per cent conviction rate – either the Japanese police and legal system are superhumanly accurate or innocent people are being imprisoned and executed by the state.

For the record, police interrogations of suspects in Japan take place in private.

Before anyone attempts to link Japan and China into a theory of ‘cruel Asiatics’, or whatever is the term now used by soi dissant ‘non-racists’ to attack the Chinese, it should be remembered that the death penalty was only abolished in Ireland in 1990. True, all death sentences after 1954 were commuted by the office of the president, but to have one’s life hang in the balance on the whim of an official is hardly humane treatment.

In addition, the Irish courts have, in their time, been remarkably inconsistent when it comes to murdering prisoners: in 1976 the Supreme Court quashed death sentences imposed on anarchists Marie and Patrick Murray for killing a Garda after a bank robbery but in 1980 it upheld death sentences imposed by the Special Criminal Court on three men convicted of murdering two Gardaí after a bank robbery in Roscommon. Then-president Patrick Hillery commuted the sentence to 40 years imprisonment without parole. The conviction of one of the three was overturned in 1995.

No new death penalties have been handed down in Ireland since 1985.

The British army, meanwhile, has never been adverse to carrying out the odd extra-judicial execution, such as the assassination of three unarmed IRA members in 1988.

Capital punishment, which we should really call state-sanctioned murder, is a disgrace to civilisation wherever in the world it takes place, not just in China. And it has nothing to do with climate talks.

(1) Some things are more important than diplomatic relations, Philip Honour, LabourList, December 30, 2009