Editor: May I implore the Senate and the House of Representatives to dis-regard the submission by Professors of Law at the Nigerian Institute for Advanced Legal Studies.
According to a newsreport, the law institute professors urged the National Assembly to abrogate constitutional death penalty for homicide and treason because “it is a matter of despair to hear that people still clamour for death penalty in the (36) states in Nigeria”.
But there’s no despairing occasion in urging death penalty for irreversible homicide, except for the Advanced Law Institute’s own un-reasonable counter-suggestion.
The jurisprudence for death penalty is the more convincing because it does not rest solely on deterrence, as putatively mis-understood. Rather, anyone who intentionally kills another unlawfully thereby announces his renunciation of his membership of humanity, insofar as humanity excludes homicide in its definition. Therefore, the duty of a good government is to fulfil that clearly expressed wish of the murderer to quit humanity by imposing the death penalty upon him. That is the jurisprudence of the death penalty, not deterrence that’s its spin-off.
I had myself pondered abolition of death penalty at a point in my life but quickly discarded it as daft because I could not fit it as a reasoning mode into assessing the punishment for other crimes. In other words, those who oppose death penalty argue it does not deter heinous crimes like murder, but this “deterrence” mantra obscures rather than illuminates. In my view, if the reasoning standard for opposing death penalty be “deterrence” and if in all of history no other crime has been deterred by imprisonment or flogging as well, it stands to reason that “deterrence”, as a purpose, can’t lead good thinking on how best to punish homicide.
Deterrence instead badly deflects attention from the irreversible act of intentional homicide by focusing wholly on how to preserve the murderer, but preserving the murderer is meretricious premise for sound jurisprudential thought.
Putting a heinous criminal out of society and out of his heinous predilection to homicide, forever, is the reasonable purpose of death penalty imposed on someone who kills another person un-lawfully, given that the person he had murdered lost his life, forever, since re-incarnation is moreso conclusively denied in law.
Seyi Awofeso,
Abuja.
