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PK’s Beef: Re - Sentence Lang Tombong & Co to death
Wednesday, 30 June 2010 23:43
By PK JarjuCapital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty..... Henry Ford
This Wednesday, I woke up early, read my Fajr Salat and thanked Almighty Allah for giving me the opportunity to witness another day in good health and sound mind. I also prayed to my Lord, cherisher and sustainer to continue showering His love, protection and guidance on me, my family and all the progenies of Adam and Eve.
As the day progressed, I logged on to the Daily Observer website and my attention was drawn to a story captioned: Sentence Lang Tombong & Co to death, Says DPP in written address. In the story, the director of public prosecution, Richard Chenge, was quoted asking his fellow Nigerian mercenary Justice Emmanuel Amadi to sentence General Lang Tombong Tamba and colleagues to death.
Reading the story, I was not surprise at all to see Mr Chenge demand the death penalty. In September last year, Mr Yahya Jammeh told the Gambian people in a GRTS interview that he will kick start the death penalty in order to counter what he called rising crimes in the country. And like I said some time ago, Mr Chenge is a hustler and is doing anything to gain admiration and recognition from Yahya Jammeh.
I am totally against the death penalty, a cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment which is done in the name of justice. I regard it as a premeditated and cold-blooded killing of humans being by the very government which is supposed to protect them.
Many people and human rights organisations like Amnesty International see the death penalty as the ultimate denial of human rights and a violation of the right to life as proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the Gambia is a signatory to.
Although there have been no reported execution of people since the killing of Mustapha Danso in the 1980s for his role in the 1981 coup, the continuous existence of the death penalty in our national laws should be a cause for concern for the Gambian people.
The Gambian National Assembly was since 2007 supposed to review the desirability or otherwise the abolition of the death penalty, but have so far failed to do it in the interest of Yahya Jammeh.
Section18 sub section 3 of the 1997 Constitution of the Gambia states: “The National Assembly shall within ten years from the date of the coming into force of this Constitution review the desirability or otherwise of the total abolition of the death penalty in The Gambia.”
And since our elected members of the National Assembly have so far refused to review this section, over 12 Gambians are now on the death row in Mile 2 Prisons after been found guilty on various capital crimes.
Many of these death row inmates will soon face a horrible death. DPP Chenge reportedly said last October that all death row inmates in the Gambia will be killed by hanging.
In calling for the death penalty, Mr Chenge is wrongly assuming that the killing of General Lang Tombong Tamba and others will serve as a deterrent or make Jammeh safer to continue his reign of terror against the Gambian people. Let him flash his mind back to the various events that have taken place in history more so in his native country, Nigeria.
There is little or no evidence to suggest that capital punishment deters crimes. Capital punishment is not fair and sometimes results in the killing of people who are completely innocent of the crimes they die for and there is no possibility of compensating them for this miscarriage of justice.
Getting Lang Tombong Tamba killed based on the flimsy coup story we have heard from thieves and self-confessed drug dealers and mercenaries will seriously erode the confidence of the Gambian people in the judicial system.
In one of his articles against the death penalty, a famous US blogger, David Chandler said: “The death penalty is based on the concept of retribution: "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and life for life. Retribution is not about protecting society. That is accomplished once the criminal is imprisoned. Rather, it is a way of collectively venting our anger. When we have been wronged we have an urge to strike back and make the offender suffer. When someone is murdered we feel we owe it to the family of the victim to avenge the death of their loved one. But vengeance cannot reverse the original act or heal the pain. Instead it arouses and legitimizes our own murderous impulses. Vengeance does violence to the soul and perpetuates violence in society.”
Also writing against the death penalty, Professor Hugo Adam Bedau of Tufts University, argues that “politicians who preach the desirability of executions as weapon of crime control deceive the public and mask their own failure to support anti-crime measures that will really work.
“A decent and humane society does not deliberately kill human beings. An execution is a dramatic, public spectacle of official, violent homicide that teaches the permissibility of killing people to solve social problems -- the worst possible example to set for society. In this century, governments have too often attempted to justify their lethal fury by the benefits such killing would bring to the rest of society. The bloodshed is real and deeply destructive of the common decency of the community; the benefits are illusory.”
Many African countries are today doing away with the death penalty, which they see as barbaric and does not serve the interest of society. And it is time the Gambian National Assembly start putting the interest of the Gambian people before Jammeh’s and without any further delay abolish the death penalty. For comments, write to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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