Human Rights Education
ACTIVITY HANDOUT
UN Committee against Torture
A Briefing for the UN Committee against Torture
..........................5.THE DEATH PENALTY
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty as a violation of fundamental human rights -- the right to life and the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
The cruelty of torture is evident. Like torture, an execution constitutes an extreme physical and mental assault on a person already rendered helpless by government authorities. The cruelty of the death penalty is manifest not only in the execution but in the time spent under sentence of death, during which the prisoner is constantly contemplating his or her own death at the hands of the state. This cruelty cannot be justified, no matter how cruel the crime of which the prisoner has been convicted.
If it is not permissible to cause grievous physical and mental harm to a prisoner by subjecting him or her to electric shocks and mock executions, how can it be permissible for public officials to attack not only the body or the mind, but the prisoner's very life? Threatening to kill a prisoner can be one of the most fearsome forms of torture. As torture, it is prohibited. How can it be permissible to subject a prisoner to the same threat in the form of a death sentence, passed by a court of law and due to be carried out by the prison authorities?
In defending its use of the death penalty, the USA repeatedly states that the punishment is not a violation of international law. However, for those countries which retain the punishment, strict international safeguards and restrictions govern its use. US authorities regularly violate such standards. The USA continues to use the death penalty against child offenders (those who were under 18 at the time of the crime), the mentally retarded, those about whose sanity there were serious doubts, people deprived of their internationally-recognized right to competent defence counsel at all stages of proceedings, and foreign nationals whose rights to consular access after arrest was violated.
Length of time on death row
When the USA ratified the Convention against Torture, it did so on the understanding that the Convention did not restrict or prohibit it from applying the death penalty, ''including any constitutional period of confinement'' prior to execution.
As Amnesty International unconditionally opposes the death penalty under all circumstances, it takes no additional position on the length of confinement to death row prior to execution. However, it is important to point out that several courts outside of the USA have held that long periods of confinement to death row renders the punishment cruel, inhuman or degrading, including the European Court of Human Rights and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. This very fact was pointed out in a dissenting opinion in November 1999 by US Supreme Court Justice Breyer in the case of two men who between them had spent more than four decades on death row. He wrote: ''Both of these cases involve astonishingly long delays flowing in significant part from constitutionally defective death penalty procedures. Where a delay, measured in decades, reflects the State's own failure to comply with the Constitution's demands, the claim that time has rendered the execution inhuman is a particularly strong one.' However, as yet, Justice Breyer remains in a minority on the court.
Many US politicians seek to cut the time between death sentence and execution. Again, it is important to point out that in doing so they are increasing the risk of execution of the wrongfully convicted. Many innocent people in the USA have been subjected to the cruelty of the death penalty for crimes they did not commit. Between 1973 and March 2000, at least 87 people have been freed from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged. Many spent years on death row and came close to execution before their wrongful conviction came to light. Anthony Porter spent more than 16 years on death row in Illinois and came within 48 hours of execution in September 1998. He was subsequently found innocent after a group of participants investigated his case and he was released in February 1999.
On 16 March 2000, Joseph Green was acquitted of the crime for which he had been sentenced to die in Florida in 1993. For nearly four of the seven years he spent in prison he was on death row, during which time eight other prisoners were executed in the prison's death chamber. On 15 March, Joseph Green told Amnesty International: ''To know a guy has been executed who you talked to, to know that one day someone is going to come and take you to death watch and then kill you -- that eats at you, and eats at you, and eats at you. Death row is very, very dehumanizing.''Conditions on death row
In addition to the cruelty of the death sentence itself, Amnesty International has serious concerns about the conditions on death rows across the country. For example it believes that conditions in H-Unit of Oklahoma State Penitentiary amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in violation of international standards. The facility houses the state's male death row population, effectively underground in tiny windowless concrete cells, in which the condemned are confined for 23 to 24 hours a day. For up to 60 days prior to their scheduled execution, the 10 inmates put to death in H-Unit in 1998 and 1999 were transferred to solitary confinement in special double-doored punishment cells and subjected to a harsh suicide watch regime, including repeated strip-searches and cell searches.
As in the case of Frank Valdes, individual prisoners on death row have allegedly been subjected to torture or ill-treatment. Christopher Beck was hours from execution in Virginia on 10 June 1999 when he was granted a stay. Exactly a month earlier, on 10 May, an hour and a half after an incident in which he threw a cup of water at a nurse through the food slot in his cell door, up to 10 prison guards entered his cell. It is alleged that they beat him for 45 minutes and arbitrarily electro-shocked him with a stun shield. He was then allegedly held in four-point restraint for 24 hours. The Warden of Sussex I State Prison informed Amnesty International that an investigation was being carried out into the incident, but the organization has not yet been told of its conclusions.
Emile Duhamel was found dead in his Texas death row cell on 9 July 1998. He was a severely mentally impaired man, with an IQ of 56, and had been diagnosed with serious mental illness, including paranoid schizophrenia. Although he was reported to have died from ''natural causes'', there was concern that medical neglect and the high temperatures (over 40 degrees centigrade) in the non-air conditioned cells during the summer heatwave may have contributed to his death. Anti-psychotic drugs, which Duhamel was taking, interfere with the body's temperature regulation. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, concerned by the USA's continuing use of the death penalty against the mentally impaired in contravention of international standards, had met Emile Duhamel during his visit to Texas death row in late 1997.
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