KOTA KINABALU: Sabah Law Society (SLS) supports the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Liew Vui Keong’s intention to abolish the death penalty and impose a moratorium on all executions until then.
SLS in a statement yesterday said it subscribes to the abolishment of the mandatory death penalty on two main grounds:
Firstly, one is on the right to life, as a fundamental right under the Federal Constitution. Taking away a life is an affront to the right of life, contrary to the meaning of humanity, mercy and sanctity of life. The death penalty, including for drug-related offences, has no place in a society that values human life, justice and mercy. The abolition of this extreme, degrading and inhumane form of punishment is consonant with the belief that every individual has an inherent right to life. This right is absolute, universal and inalienable, irrespective of any crimes that may have been committed.
There have been instances where trials in the court of law have been compromised that led to a miscarriage of justice. In Malaysia, there are known cases which led to the conviction of several accused for capital offences because of false evidence given by prosecution witnesses. However, their convictions were overturned on appeal and the false witnesses were charged for perjury and sentenced to imprisonment upon conviction.
This view is fortified by the opinion of Datuk Ian Chin (retired judge of the High Court) who supports the abolishment of the death penalty. He opines that there is no way of knowing whether the Federal Court had ever failed in a case to notice a miscarriage of justice since it was never challenged that they had.
The Federal Court is not known to deliver grounds of decision when affirming a decision with the result that one can only look to the appeal record to see whether there is anything amiss in their decisions. It must be remembered the legal system is not infallible as said in the following statement:
“No judiciary, anywhere in the world, is so robust that it can guarantee that innocent life will not be taken, and there is an alarming body of evidence to indicate that even well-functioning legal systems have sentenced to death men and women who were subsequently proven innocent.” (Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights).
Chin is of the further view that the perception that the legal system is not infallible can be justified by the following statistics showing that innocent people having been wrongly sentenced to death:
By category, the leading contributing causes of wrongful conviction in the death-row exonerations between 2007 and April 2017 were: Official misconduct (28 cases, 82.4%), Perjury or false accusation (26 cases, 76.5%), False or misleading forensic evidence (11 cases, 32.4%), Inadequate legal defence (eight cases, 23.5%), False or fabricated confession (six cases, 17.6%), Mistaken eyewitness identification (four cases, 11.8%) (HTTP://deathpenaltyinfo.org/causes-wrongful-convictions)
Secondly, the death penalty is not a sufficient deterrent effect. According to the de facto law minister, he was informed that the total numbers of prisoners in early October this year stood at 59,997 prisoners with 1,279 on death row. In less than three weeks, there was an increase of 5,225 prisoners with two prisoners sentenced to death. Of the 65,222 prisoners, about 55 per cent or some 36,313 of them are in the prisons for drug related offences.
Most of them are found to be drug abusers rather than drug users, and this therefore calls for treatment rather than imprisonment. The menace of drugs is also reflected in the 1,281 death row inmates as 927 of them were sentenced for drug trafficking, a capital offence under the Dangerous Drug Act 1952.
Statistics had shown that it is not the real perpetrators who were charged, instead it was the victims of circumstances who were charged.
SLS is made to understand that in Malaysia’s context, crimes for murder and drug trafficking have not decreased since independence and there appears to be no significant reduction in the crimes for which the death penalty is currently mandatory.