Unwilling executioners?

I was surprised that to date there were no rapid responses to this
article.

It occured to me that I might be one of the very few doctors in this
country who had a personal experience in participating in the death
penalty as a lecturer in Forensic medicine and also serving as a judicial
medical officer in Sri Lanka.

I had no choice in the matter but since the method of execution was
hanging my role was to be present to ensure the length of the drop was
appropriate to the weight of the individual (although in practice the
hangman ensured this) to declare death at the end and carry out a
postmortem as a statutory requirement to determine the cause of death! As
the judicial medical officer I was one of a few who were required to be
present or permitted to be present at the time of execution.

I shall not delve into the traumatic experiences but my reason for
entering this discussion was my experience over one individual who I had
every reason to believe was innocent. This perhaps is entirely feasible in
the context of the levels of corrupton prevalent within the police force.

Those in the death row had strict restriction on visitors and some
never had any. The assistant superintendent of the prison, a very kind
hearted man and my teacher in school before he took up the prison job
asked me to spend time talking to these individuals, as he put it, to make
them feel that they were not just animals held in cages. Many of them were
disowned and this description was not far from how some of them
felt.Talking to them was an enlighteening experience but what struck me
most was that every single individual in the death row admitted murder bar
one. Admission was accompanied by expression of repentance or in some
instances a promise to repeat if there ever was another opportunity.

This one indidvidual protested his innocence with hood over his head
as walked to his death. He continued as the noose was placed round his
neck and was in the middle of the sentence expressing his innocnece even
as the trap door opened and he went down.

The micarriage of justice subsequently came to be known. A dead man
does not return to receive justice.

The prison superintendent told me that of all those who were hanged
in that prison during his term of office, this man was the only one who
had maintained his innocence to the very end.

As I held the rope to feel if the transmission of the carotid
impulses had stopped I knew that he would have been protesting his
innocence to the very last beat of his heart.

Although this may not sound to many as the most powerful case that
has been made for abolishing capital punishment, I felt that I was in a
position to convey my relatively unique personal experience and contribute
my mite.

It is incompreehnsible how any civilised society could practice any
form of capital punishmnet considered benign or barbaric and worse still
if there was ever the possibility of even one innocent life being taken in
this manner.