Death penalty is vile
NEVER should right-thinking people falter in their relentless campaign against the death penalty. Only the blind, the mischievous and the most dangerous folks a country can produce will continuously call for the reintroduction of this vile form of punishment.
Firstly, almost sixty percent of the 194 states that make up the UN have realised the absolutely devastating effect of it, its potential to drag states into all-consuming violence, followed by total destruction of these rogue states. Our country was also on the brink of such a disaster, but with God’s intervention we were saved from it.
Secondly, lovers of death penalty live in a dream world of their own. They must answer the question how they intend killing as many as 18 to 20 000 murderers each year and they are not all caught, prosecuted and sentenced. The death penalty is a racist monstrosity. It failed everywhere.
Thirdly, what about even more rapists? Most victims choose not to report their misfortune fearing even more humiliation from inept policemen and women, and just as ruthless lawyers out to fill their already bulging pockets.
Fourthly, the judges who are also just human? South Africans may not be aware of a former South African judge now living and practising in Canada, who embarrassed his country of birth by humiliating a victim of rape resulting in his resignation from the bench. The atrocious way apartheid judges sustained such a vile system for so long, by making people believe that it is morally correct to kill thousands and thousands, must still be unravelled.
Should political parties longing for the death penalty ever succeed in bringing this scourge back it will be the end of our brittle democracy. There are far too many misinformed, cunning folks, fed by these unscrupulous vultures, and certain sectors of the media and even religions, who advocate for it.
As our former father of the nation Madiba, envied by so many countries, proclaimed: “Never, never again.”
There is too much work for each one of us to make our great country succeed. Koert Meyer Welgelegen