Death penalty can never be justified

THE time has arrived for letter writers to newspapers publicly propagating killing to be called to book in the form of prosecution for hate speech (Letters, March 1).

It can never be correct in any judicial system for one person to serve a lengthy jail term for merely shouting a derogatory racial term, and folks like this writer to openly call for something as dastardly as the death penalty to be reinstated.

Our country is drowning in violence, and all that lovers of the death penalty can think of is to kill thousands of people. They can never tell us how they intend doing this. The gallows in Pretoria have been dismantled. Our Constitutional Court unanimously outlawed the death penalty in 1995.

More than 60% of the world’s countries have abolished this scourge, for good reason.

There are already 16000 serving life sentences, therefore these will have to be dispatched before they can think of starting their massive slaughter.

A Grade 2 learner will tell you it is utterly impossible, impractical.

What methods would they use? Hanging, death squads, gas chambers, firing squads, poisoning, beheading, lethal injection, or reverting to extra-judicial killings? This mass slaughter would have to continue unabated day and night 24/7.

Remember Imam Haron, Ahmed Timol, Steve Biko, Matthew Goniwe, Anton Lubowski and thousands of others.

And to invoke religion to further spice his argument, thereby confusing an already fearful, gullible electorate on the eve of a crucial election, is even more dangerous. The evil apartheid regime also used the Bible to justify the death penalty, which was proved a heresy and a crime against humanity.

Regarding the Torah, Israel, the only Jewish state, abolished the death penalty in 1961, soon after the hanging of Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s henchmen, responsible for the killing of millions of people in Nazi Germany.

Regarding the Bible, God Almighty will never expect His people to kill each other.

That would contradict one of His commandments, the fifth, “Thou shalt not kill”.

If we do this, how much better are we than gangsters, terrorists and armed robbers? Who must do the killing and how?

As soon as the hate speech bill becomes law, these folks should be charged with instigating violence.

Anyone who supports the death penalty is himself a potential murderer.

KOERT MEYER | Welgelegen