death penalty

A friend asked on facebook for our thoughts on whether the Opposition has the welfare of the country at heart by defeating the "hanging bill" in Parliament this week.  It triggered the usual discussion about hanging.  Along the way, he said that based on the murder stats from the years around the last set of hangings in T&T, hanging definitely is a deterrent.

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.

Continued from:

• Should T&T retain the death penalty? – Part 1 of 3

• Should T&T retain the death penalty? – Part 2 of 3

Continued from:

• Should T&T retain the death penalty? – Part 1 of 3

The term 'death penalty' is a literary iceberg - two words that hide a huge amount of detail beneath the surface.  When I attempted to discuss this in the past, it bore little fruit because either folks assumed I had confrontational motives, or they were too emotional to explain their thoughts, or they wanted to address so many issues, that they were all over the shop in terms of coherence.