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Volunteering to hang
Saturday, 18 August 2012 - 10:42 AM SL Time
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An ex-soldier named S. K. D. Somaweera, whose daughter, Nishadi, suffered a violent death at the hands of a rapist has offered to operate the gallows free of charge to help the country get rid of dangerous criminals including his daughter`s killer sentenced to death. His offer has, we believe, struck a responsive chord with the public who fear for the safety of their near and dear ones. Given the sheer number of people whose family members, friends and relatives have been harmed by criminals, the government will not be short of volunteer hangmen if it is really desirous of enlisting their support.
The government is employing various gimmicks such as testing the gallows and recruiting hangmen to make the people believe that it is serious about dealing with the nether world of crime, but it will not be able to go on fooling the people forever. Pressure is mounting on it to resume judicial executions as people are desperate for a solution. Now that a victim`s father has volunteered to work as a hangman, the on-going campaign for hanging criminals is sure to gather momentum in time to come. The day may not be far off when people take to the streets in their thousands, demanding the execution of criminals condemned to death.
It behoves the government to take serious note of people`s resentment, their protests against the increasing lawlessness and the state`s inability to ensure their safety. The right to self-preservation constitutes the bedrock of the modern state and when deprived of it, the people naturally lose faith in the rule of law and rebel against the government in power, threatening a country`s stability.
Thomas Hobbes argues in Leviathan that nothing could be worse than a life without the protection of the State, and tells us about a state of nature where people`s lives were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short because they were at war with each other. Finally, they were left with no alternative but to cede some of their rights collectively thus paving the way for the emergence of the modern state. John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, argues that a government`s legitimacy is derived from people`s delegation of their right to self-preservation to prevent individuals from acting as the judge, the jury and the executioner. A government that fails to protect the citizenry is certainly without any legitimacy.
People of this country, more often than not, take the law into their own hands, seeking instant justice. They torch buses involved in fatal accidents or houses of murder suspects. The situation took a turn for the worse last year when people panicked on hearing stories of the so-called Grease Devils who were said to be harming women. Strangers got assaulted in some areas and two persons were beaten to death in one place by a group of villagers who mistakenly thought they were Grease Devils. Fortunately, mass hysteria died down with the passage of time and those devils have ceased to trouble women.
If the government continues to take the deterioration of the law and order situation and the attendant increase in the crime rate for granted, people are likely to graduate from setting houses of suspects on fire and surrounding police stations demanding justice to extreme action like kangaroo trials and extrajudicial executions. It is against this backdrop that the aforesaid father`s request for permission to hang death row prisoners should be viewed. It is doubtful whether the government could recruit hangmen in that manner, but it should heed the powerful message he has sought to convey to it through his offer on behalf of concerned citizens: `Unless you hang criminals, we are ready to do so ourselves!`
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