Who will be the first to swing?
President has date in mind and is busy preparing death list
Whist the country suffers in darkness and sweats it out with the ongoing power cuts, it may be of some comfort of some to know that President Sirisena has not been idle but has been busy burning the midnight oil preparing the death list of those who wishes to hang.
Eager to portray himself as The Terminator to reintroduce the death penalty in practice, a practice that five presidents before him shunned to follow, Sirisena has chosen instead to go off the beaten track in the footsteps of Philippines’ Duterte, whom he met on his visit to that archipelago this January and returned home armed with greater resolve to establish a macho image as a man with a backbone.
Two years into his presidency he was to remark in public that many perceived him as a man spineless but that he will soon prove his vertebra. In the last lap of his presidency, he seems to have discovered its existence and now seems to be hell bent on stringing some death row inmates to prove its existence.
In February, he announced that there will be the first public execution within two months of a drug dealer; that is before the Sinhala and Hindu New Year. Last week he announced that he had already fixed a date and probably an auspicious time as well to carry out judicial murder with presidential assent. And this week, he also announced that he was busy preparing his own death list, Duterte style.
One problem that may have seemed to beset him in his choice of whom to hang first may also have dawned in the distant horizon and surfed to the shore when a well-known drug dealer Welle Suda’s appeal to the Appeal Court again his death sentence was dismissed by the Supreme Court on Friday. The Court of Appeal confirmed the death sentence imposed by the High Court on Gampola Widanelage Samantha Kumara, alias Wele Suda in 2015. The bench comprising Justices Achala Wengapulli and Deepali Wijesundara dismissed the appeal filed on behalf of the convict.
High Court Judge Preethi Padman Surasena on October 14, 2015 sentenced Wele Suda to death after he was found guilty of charges of possessing 7.05 grams of heroin in Mount Lavinia in 2008. But if he is granted leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, he may not be in the picture. What a pity. He would have done nicely, notorious as he is. Some other will have to be found.
One problem, though. No hangman has still been recruited, even though over seventy have applied for the job, a stumbling block perhaps being that the qualifications demanded to occupy the post to kill another man also demand that one must be educationally qualified more than some parliamentarians and must have an impeccable moral character. Perhaps that may well be sorted out this week.
Well, if not, to prove the mettle in the man, there is always one’s own self to do the job. For there is no extent to which one will go to, to prove one’s libido and that he has not lost his mojo, is there?
Addressing Parliament in February … he announced there will be a hanging in Lanka, the first to be done after Maru Sira was hanged in 1976, 42 years ago. Now with all systems in place, it seems the nation can welcome the New Year not to the caw of the koha but to the last squeaks of a human gasping for air with neck throttled in a noose.