FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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A blood-thirsty call for Thailand to retain the death penalty 

A blood-thirsty call for Thailand to retain the death penalty 

Re: “Why Thailand shouldn’t follow Malaysia and abolish the death penalty”, Have Your Say, yesterday.

“Eye for an eye man” (Angry of Tunbridge Wells) advances some well-trodden excuses for retaining the death penalty – or judicial murder, as some would have it, me included. We are treated to the usual mantras to justify the patently unjustifiable. 
We could take this argument further by examining the writer’s chosen pen-name, “An eye for an eye man”. How about, thou shalt not kill? Or, vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord? These thoughts, including the admittedly faith-based variant, can be considered universal in a civilised humanitarian sense. If killing is wrong, it is wrong, and not right when it suits some convenient, morally bereft agenda.
In his or her catachresis about implied deterrence, the writer used the flawed assumption that just because a “murderer put to death cannot commit another murder”, despite the undisputed fact that capital punishment is emphatically NOT a deterrent. If it were, there would never be another homicide, anywhere, ever. The writer clearly does not understand the concept, let alone the practice, of deterrence. 
Apparently, “no less than” 52 “advanced” countries still kill criminals. We have no definition of what he or she means by “advanced” here, or indeed which countries are being referred to. Conversely, there are also very many truly advanced democracies that have abandoned barbarism, and quite rightly abolished this disgusting lack of judicial imagination. Check them out.
Incredibly, the writer took us to the gratuitous extremities of mindless revenge: “If I had a teenage daughter who had been brutally raped and murdered I would wish for the culprit to be brutally raped with a broom handle and then executed in a very slow, painful manner.” Why not pander to those “brutally” barbarous instincts, and use a power tool instead? Don’t stop there, how about a tactical nuclear warhead up the old trumper? Please, please, “Eye for an eye man”, do not insult my intelligence with that worn-out, bovine, emotional blackmail of “if it were your daughter, you would change your mind on abolition”. No, I would not.
Perhaps the writer might wish to advise us on how redress might be achieved when – not if – miscarriages of justice inevitably occur? Perhaps he or she knows a necromancer, who can offer an apology to all those innocent victims of state-sponsored, bloodthirsty revenge? What, one wonders, would he/she say to their bereaved families? “Sorry, it was all a huge mistake”?
As for moral alternatives to state murder I would be relaxed with debating that, too, at the appropriate juncture.
Dr Frank
Bangkok

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