Hang Our Heads in Shame

The recent execution of Dhananjoy Chatterjee following the dismissal of a last ditch attempt to save his life calls for some introspection from all concerned. The human rights community, the legal profession and the judiciary all have a heavy cross to bear.

Other actors in this sordid episode of judicial murder have not covered themselves with glory either. The Marxist Communist rulers in West Bengal, and the Church of North India, in particular, have demonstrated utter contempt for their own founding principles and their stated beliefs and ideologies, one by vociferously espousing an un-Marxist idea and the other by remaining silent.

The Church of North India first.

After a prolonged delay in the execution of his original sentence in 1991, Chatterjee’s death sentence reappeared before the public’s eyes this year, as various legal initiatives were launched to commute the sentence. The victim of the crime was a student of Kolkata’s Welland Gouldsmith School functioning under the auspices of the West Bengal diocese of the Church North India. When the media began to cover this case, Ms. Gillian D’Costa Hart, principal of Welland Gouldsmith school on numerous occasions publicly condemned the brutality of Chatterjee’s crime and spoke out vehemently in favour of the death sentence as the appropriate punishment. Hart told the Hindustan Times that “[t]he stay order [of Chatterjee’s execution] is shocking. When Hetal was crying for mercy, did anybody hear her? We thought she would get justice.” She was also quoted on a television channel stating that “[e]verybody, all the students, raised their hands when I asked them whether Dhananjoy Chatterjee should be hanged or not," purportedly representing the unanimous sentiment within the school.

Hart’s remarks advocating the death penalty are extremely troublesome because her message appears to uphold aspects of the criminal justice system that are founded on vengeance. These ideas violate human sanctity and are contrary to the principles of mercy and forgiveness of the Christian tradition. It is therefore surprising that the Church has not found it fit to rein Ms. Hart’s obvious attempts to inculcate ideas of retributive justice in young minds.

The Church of England as well as the World Council of Churches, which the Church of North India is a member of, holds an unequivocal position against the death penalty. The General Synod, representing the Church of England’s official view, pronounced on the death penalty issue in 1983, “[t]hat this Synod would deplore the reintroduction of capital punishment into the United Kingdom sentencing policy,” and it has not changed the policy since then. The World Council of Churches demonstrated its firm conviction against the death penalty in a letter to the US Governor George Ryan, commending his order to commute all death sentences in Illinois in 2003: “The capital punishment operates against the Christian principles of compassion, love and forgiveness. To promote the abolition of capital punishment is an expression of Christian belief in the sanctity of life.” The Church of North India continues to maintain a silence on the issue. Are we to assume then that it subscribes to Ms. Hart’s views?

Another important concern for the current situation is the lack of moral leadership shown by the Anglican Church in India, and West Bengal in particular, in guiding its adherents on this critical social issue. The Anglican Church in various parts of the world has been a voice of socially-conscious religious leaders. The Anglican Church of Canada had been actively involved in opposing the 1987 reinstatement attempt of capital punishment in Canada. In the United States, the Anglican Bishop of Oklahoma, the Rt Rev Robert Moody actively advocated a moratorium on the death penalty in 2001 when 11 people were executed in Oklahoma. Bishop Frank Griswold, the Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal (Anglican) Church of the US, criticised the execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2001 stating that “[a] public ritual of death can only coarsen our spirits and deaden our sensibilities. Though undoubtedly Timothy McVeigh committed one of the most heinous crimes in the history of our country, I fear that execution as spectacle can only poison the soul of our nation.”

The Bishop of Kolkata and the Church of North India have clearly failed to exercise their moral leadership by taking a strong stance against the death penalty and reproving Ms. Hart’s statements. As an educator, moreover, it was Ms. Hart’s duty to encourage a debate on this critical issue and supply both sides of the argument. Instead, she asked a black-or-white question and demanded a show of hands without urging the girls to reflect on it. And the answer apparently settled the issue. It must be asked if the Anglican Church wishes the students under its tutelage to imbibe such values, and worse, have them answer crucial questions without reflection.

The judiciary and the legal fraternity

The judicial process is not infallible.

The Indian criminal justice system has not been able to cope with the weight of an immense caseload, the lack of resources and the vital needs of the most impoverished criminal defendants. One major problem with the system is that poor and illiterate defendants generally do not have access to adequate legal assistance. For example, due to limited amount funding for legal aid, legal aid lawyers, even if experienced, can spend only a limited amount of time preparing a defence, and mistakes made by defence lawyers at trial cannot generally be corrected on appeal.

Admittedly, these concerns are not necessarily cause for suspending the criminal justice system altogether, but in the case of the death penalty, the obligation for suspending executions is different. Because failure to strictly adhere to the standards of procedural fairness may have such catastrophic consequences in these cases, the death penalty should be suspended until the Government is able to rectify gross problems concerning fairness within the system. 

Indeed, as many commentators have observed, under the present system, courts have disproportionately sentenced poor and uneducated defendants to death. Justice Bhagwati, in his 1980 dissenting judgment in Bachan Singh, wrote: 

            There can be no doubt that death penalty in its actual operation is discriminatory for it strikes mostly against the poor and deprived sections of the community [,] and the rich and the affluent usually escape from its clutches.

And finally, West Bengal’s Stalinists

“We want him hanged,” declared Comrade Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the Marxist Communist Chief Minister of the state of West Bengal.

It is evident that the Kolkata Communist has more in common with Stalin than with Marx. The Indian Marxists’ preoccupation about a correct rendering of Indian history notwithstanding, they seem to have forgotten the revolution of 1917. “Down with the Death Penalty!” was the cry in Moscow before February 1917. The words were emblazoned on the red flags and when the Tsar abdicated in February 1917, the death penalty was abolished.

Perhaps West Bengal’s communists need to be reminded of Marx’s statement on capital punishment in a short article he published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1853 (Cain and Hunt (eds.) 1979: 193-196). After stating that “it would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expediency of capital punishment could be found in a society glorying in its civilization,” he criticised proponents of the death penalty like Kant and Hegel for giving “transcendental sanction to the rules of existing society”. He concluded the article with the following rhetorical question: “Is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?”

Clearly, all of us – human rights activists, teachers, legal professionals, the judiciary, Christians, Marxists and all those who would like to see civilization evolve rather than degenerate – need to do some introspection. The noose around our basic human values is getting tighter.

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