Humanists can be human, too

The death penalty has re-surfaced as a topic of national discussion due to a recent comment by the Hon. Minister of Works and Transport, who was Ag. Prime Minister at the time. The T&T Humanist Association (TTHA) issued a formal response, before TTHA representative and columnist Kevin Baldeosingh wrote his own column and appeared on a breakfast talk-show.  The TTHA stated that it is against the retention of the death penalty as a legal option. While, as Mr. Baldeosingh said, the TTHA arrives at its positions after rational assessment of the evidence available, I question, based on some of their statements, whether they have arrived at the right conclusion on this issue despite failing to apply logic as effectively as they would wish.

Firstly, the TTHA's official response noted the comparative experiences of Canada, which abolished the death penalty in 1976, and USA which re-instated the death penalty in the same year after a 10-year moratorium. TTHA stated that American homicide rates rose after 1976, while Canada's declined. It offered this as evidence to support its argument that carrying out the death penalty fails to reduce crime. However, the TTHA forgot to mention the possibility that other factors could have influenced the results in both countries. For example, were there any differences in population demographics, cost of living, average wealth, education, laws and murder detection methods that may have influenced the differing murder trends?

Secondly, Mr. Baldeosingh noted that pro-execution supporters were wrong to claim that the murder rate in T&T dropped in the aftermath of the multiple hanging of Dole Chadee and others in 1999. He correctly noted that in actual fact, the murder rate went up the following year: from 93 in 1999 to 120 in 2000. However, it is ironic that Mr. Baldeosingh highlighted this error while accusing pro-execution supporters of "avoiding facts".  Mr. Baldeosingh and the TTHA forgot to mention that in 1998, 98 murders were committed; so the number of murders in the year of the hangings was actually less than that of the previous year.  In fact, if we believe the statistics on ttcrime.com for the years 1994 onwards (at the moment, the official T&T Police Service website only gives statistics from 2008 onwards), we had the lowest number of murders in 1999.  So, why should the rise in the murder rate from 1999 to 2000 be any more noteworthy than the drop in murder rate from 1998 to 1999?  Did the hangings in June 1999 actually act as a deterrent during 1999?  If others were hanged in the first half of 2000, would there have been less murders that year?

To its credit, the TTHA's statement noted that the Chadee executions is a limited example.  It is dangerous to make any conclusions when your sample of events is very small.  Using the rise in murder rates in 2000 after the cluster of hangings in 1999 to imply that hanging failed as a deterrent is as dodgy as saying hanging is a deterrent because murders dropped in each of the five successive years after Glen Ashby was hanged in 1994.

Thirdly, Mr. Baldeosingh said it's "cognitive dissonance" for some folks to support execution but oppose abortion on the grounds that life is sacred.  However, those same folks may ask if the TTHA is equally unprincipled by being anti-execution because it's "cruel", yet have no similarly firm position against abortion.

So when Mr. Baldeosingh deftly used sarcasm to hint that pro-execution supporters "avoid facts", "avoid principle" and "avoid logic" when making their arguments, it seemed a bit hypocritical for him and the TTHA to do the same when making theirs. It also made doubly funny his suggestion that pro-execution supporters "avoid humility", especially when he made these errors and concluded that pro-execution supporters have nothing in common with him as they have "neither knowledge [nor] ethics".  It appears that even curly-haired people make mistakes.  A timely reminder that humanists can be human.

Both the pro- and anti-execution supporters' arguments need to be carefully analysed.  Especially when they inadvertently or deliberately imply some causal relationship between the death penalty and crime rates, through careful inclusion and omission of facts.  To me, the most valid anti-execution argument I've heard thus far in the public domain has been that it is useless to speak of re-implementing the death penalty when (1) our murder detection rates are so low that we have virtually no one to penalise, and (2) it diverts focus from the need to apply existing criminological and sociological theories to address the disproportionate number of our youth becoming murderers.

PS: I first explored this issue in a three-part article here in Oct/Nov 2009. See Part 1 (and links to the other parts) here.