MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 3 January 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Circumstances have compelled this article. And I mean compelled. I refuse, as a matter of duty, to discuss my subjective feelings on any matter of public importance. Invariably, I deal with the facts of the matter, and hardly ever my private feelings. Emotive reactions usually blur the facts. I avoid the latter.
But over Christmas I hardly went anywhere, anytime, anyhow, without people – mainly women – coming up to me and confidentially and sympathetically asking me how I felt about my wife’s murderer having his death sentence commuted by the High Court, on the grounds that his 5 years stay on death row, while he himself was appealing, constituted cruel and inhuman punishment. The Privy Council had made that ruling, and, being the highest court, its judgement in Pratt and Morgan had to stand.
This is how the rational side of me responded to all questioners. Some were surprised. Others felt I was just being “rational.” More or less, accepting serenely what I could not change. After all, I said to my sons, outraged by the decision: victims, direct or indirect, do not and cannot determine punishment in any system of civilised justice.
But there was another side to it. Perhaps two other sides. When Arah Hector was murdered, all of her children were abroad. It was a disaster for me personally. Few things have been more difficult for me to do. I had a terrible sense of having let the children down. I was in Africa when Arah, more than a wife to me, was brutally murdered. She who had campaigned around the world against violence inflicted on women, socially and physically had its fallen victim. I felt that my absence from the island, however justifiable, had in someway contributed. Ché, Rohan and Amilcar, did everything possible to relieve me of any such feeling. It persisted.
A better way to put that would be to use an example. When Arah, an exceptional person in terms of commitment, pursuit of her beliefs, independence of thought and action, was murdered, Amilcar the last was 10 years old. We lived together at home. Every time I went out and he was home alone I could not get rid of the nagging feeling, persistent as ever, that some similar tragedy would befall him, in my absence. But I could not stay at home everyday, every night. If I arrived home and he was not there I would, up to five years after, break out into a sweat, sometimes hot, sometimes cold. The suffering of those who experience a murder in the family takes many forms.
Anyway, Amilcar sensed the perturbation, the ennervation of spirit, despite my attempt to look “cool” whenever he returned. If he left home when I was not there he would leave a note (from age 10), saying where he was and what time he would be back. He, in turn, expected the same from me. I complied.
Once, he came home long after he said he would. In the long wait I must have played Bach’s Sheep may safely graze about a hundred times. When he got in he took one look at me, (I, believing myself to be supremely calm) and said “Cool it, man, lightning does not strike twice at the same spot.” We both laughed. Knowingly.
On another occasion, I was unusually late. Amilcar was certain that some dastardly act had befallen me. Late, I had not called. Something had to be wrong. If even I were on a personal mission, he was certain, I would have called. Something had to be wrong. In fact, I had to be dead. I was not married again then. Amilcar called everywhere. I was nowhere. In the process, of course, he revealed that I was out! Those who ought not to have known, now knew. When I got in, eventually, despite my remonstrations he did not hear a word. He was just satisfied that I was alive and well. Whatever had happened as a result of his raising an alarm, I could remedy that in whatever way I thought best. That was a matter for me. In the end he said simply, “Just don’t let this happen again!” He was merciful enough not to add the parental “You hear me!” at the end. We both laughed. I understood. It never happened again. I knew how he must have suffered in that long interim. Besides, he was not given to Bach’s Sheep may safely graze! It is in a thousand such ways that the victims of a murder, however indirect, suffer. Only who knows feels it, and in feeling it, in the telling of it, words are inadequate. The pain allows of no forgetting.
On to another matter. When the news came, that Arah’s killer had his death sentence commuted to life Imprisonment, it came by way of a hardened journalist, Antigua’s longest serving journalist, who was a friend from childhood. He was at the Court and called. Even his voice was tremulous, though a hardened journalist. I had expected the judgement of the Court to go the way it went. Yet, when it came the contemplation was entirely different from the reality. I felt as it I had been immersed in a bath of ice cold water, and dunked further in every time I tried to get out. Usually I write the news story myself, as a calming device. This time I could not do it.
By a strange kind of coincidence, Amilcar, now studying computer science abroad, has an uncanny knack of calling every time something untoward happens and about which he knows nothing. As soon as I had put down the phone from my journalist friend giving news of the commutation, Amilcar called. Usually I give the bad news straight up, sticking to the facts. Last time he called I had to tell him that his brother Ché had an accident on the job and was burnt, face, chest and hands. This time after the commutation of the death sentence on his mother’s murderer I did not breathe a word to Amilcar. I could not tell him. How would he take it? No doubt he would have felt that life imprisonment for his mother’s murderer was tantamount to freeing him. The punishment would not have matched the crime.
Amilcar had heard, even before me, that when Cabinet had discussed whether to hang or not to hang, a Cabinet member had said Don’t hang this would hurt Tim Hector more and reduce the sting of his criticism of the regime. The murder of Arah, said the Cabinet member, had reduced Tim Hector’s cutting edge. Amilcar was shocked. When I heard it, I thought this was only a less cruel act than the murder itself. Worse, I had taught the particular Cabinet Minister up to his graduation from the AGS. The cruelty of a criminal, in his own self-interest, knows no bounds.
I was unable to raise the matter with Amilcar. For the first time I was less than honest with my own children. I did not and could not call him at Christmas. I had no right to spoil his Christmas vacation. I did not tell Jennifer, till some five hours after. Nor did I call my brother friend Lukie. When we did speak we both avoided this issue.
Jennifer, like all women who spoke to me about this commutation, was livid. If Antigua and Barbuda was going to abolish the death penalty, let us do so by our own legislation on the matter. But to be bound by a Privy Council decision, on the basis of what lawyers call stare decisis, literally, the binding decision was to give the Privy Council not just powers to finally judge, but to legislate. No court should legislate. Only Parliament should legislate.
In my own case, I was furious at the Lester Bird regime. I hasten to add, though ACLM forbade me to say so in print or public statement, that I am not a partisan of capital punishment. More on that later.
I was furious because, the Lester Bird regime failed utterly to come to terms, like Barbados, with its own views as to whether or not a condemned murderer, by virtue of appeals, is held in prison for more than 5 years, whether this constitutes “cruel and inhuman punishment”. The Lester Bird regime did not even bat an eyelid to pay attention to this critical issue. It simply ignored the issue. Busy, as always with its own business of using the State as means of private accumulation it paid no attention to the most serious of serious matters – respect for human Life.
Let me be clear as to my own views on the matter. Holding a condemned murderer in prison for five or more years, by virtue of his or her appeals against the death sentence, does not in anyway constitute cruel and unusual punishment. If that were so then life imprisonment for condemned murderer would also constitute cruel and unusual punishment. So holding and so believing, reduces murder to a commonplace criminal act. Therefore, the Privy Council judgement in Pratt and Morgan, was a device to legislate for territories under its jurisdiction the abolition of the death penalty. That ought not to be, and cannot stand.
To my mind, West Indian jurists and legal luminaries, once more failed Caribbean society. Angry about the Privy Council, through its judgement in Pratt and Morgan virtually abolishing the death penalty, the luminaries advocated replacing the Privy Council with a Caribbean Supreme Court. They pitched their tents on the ground that the Privy Council, as the highest Court, was a breach of Caribbean sovereignty. Instead of passing legislation as to whether or not in its view, holding a condemned murderer for five or more years on death row constituted cruel and inhuman punishment, Caribbean legislators and legal luminaries, diverted attention from the issue at hand, by the argument about a Caribbean Appeals Court – which we can ill afford in our structurally adjusted circumstances, and which we cannot afford by virtue of the fact that in no single independent territory have we succeeded in insulating the judiciary from overt or covert political manipulation. Our method of appointing judges opens the judiciary to both covert and overt manipulation. The recent debate over the appointment of an OECS Chief Justice, is but the most recent example.
Some day, I hope the entire Lester Bird regime will pay for its crime of omission in not dealing with the issue that holding a condemned murderer on death row for five or more years during the course of appeals, does not constitute cruel and inhuman punishment. The Lester Bird regime has no excuse for its failure in this respect. It simply does not care.
I said before that I was, and still remain, opposed to the death penalty. One event has brought my belief in this respect under doubt. It is not the cruel murder of the irreplaceable Arah. And no experience should have been more challenging to that belief. However, the one that shook me, was the murders of Tutsi by Hutu and vice versa in Rwanda and Burundi. Genocide it seemed to me needed more than life imprisonment. But I returned to my old view for I could not endorse the state killing the thousand and ten thousands who killed in Rwanda and Burundi.
Why am I opposed to the death penalty? To me it is a relic of primitive times, when there was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, hence a life for a life. The death penalty belongs to those far off times when there was slavery, branding and similar vile punishments. Like those barbaric punishments the death penalty has no place in a civilised society. It appeals to the principle of revenge.
Recently, a Jewish scholar pulled me up short when he pointed that the Bible in its original Hebrew form does not say “Thou Shall not Kill.” For the Bible itself justifies killing almost from beginning to end. What the Hebrew Bible says I was told by this Jewish scholar, himself a retired investment banker, was “Thou Shall Not Murder.” The difference was pointed out to me in response to my own argument that if society upholds the injunction “Thou shall not kill”, then it cannot itself kill an offender. But because the injunction is “Thou shall not murder,” does not imply that a convicted murderer should be killed by the state.
Therefore my second argument against the death penalty is obvious. My opposition to capital punishment definitely does not arise from liberal misplaced sympathy for convicted murderers. I am adamant murder demonstrates a lack of respect for the highest form of life – human life. Therefore murder is abhorrent. Consequently any policy of State authorised killings is equally abhorrent and immoral.
Thirdly, the death penalty is irrevocable. It deprives an individual, however few, of the benefits of new evidence that might warrant the reversal of a death sentence. A death sentence once imposed cannot be set aside. It is done. There is no reversal based on new evidence. No humane punishment should be that irrevocable.
Fourthly, reliance on the death penalty obscures the true causes of crime, and diverts attention from the social measures and reforms which contribute to the control of crime. Politicians, usually reactionary, who preach the desirability of executions as a weapon, deceive the public and mask their own failure to advance and support measures that will really reduce crime. Crime is socially induced. It is the removal of the social causes, which is the only real deterrent. The resort to violence and brutality against capital offenders is no less brutal and no less criminal.
And now my final point on the subject. The death penalty is not a deterrent.
I shall use hard facts and figures to prove this point beyond all reasonable doubt.
In the United States there are death-penalty and non-death-penalty States. Death penalty States as a group do not have lower homicide rates than non-death penalty states. Then and there it is self-evident that the death penalty is not a deterrent. During the 1980’s death-penalty states averaged 7.5 criminal homicides per 100,000 of population; abolition states averaged 7.4 (Source: Uniform Crime Reports annually 1980–89).
In neighbouring states, – one with the death penalty others without it, the one with the death penalty does not show a consistently lower rate of criminal murder. For instance, between 1972 and 1990, the murder rate in Michigan – which has no death penalty – was generally as low as or lower than neighbouring Indiana, which restored the death penalty in 1973. The death penalty then does not deter murder.
The evidence here adduced is not speculation, but proven human experience. It cannot be ignored.
Finally there is this on the question of the death penalty being a deterrent. People who commit murder either premeditate them, or they do not. If the crime is premeditated the criminal ordinarily concentrates on escaping detection, arrest and conviction. The threat of even the severest punishment will not deter those who expect to escape detection and arrest. If the crime is not premeditated, then it is impossible to imagine how the threat of any punishment could deter it. Do you agree? If not, why not. I suspect you will be in the realm of a sheer emotive response, for the logic is too compelling to be resisted.
By both example and logic I have shown how the death penalty is not a deterrent. Deterrence is the strongest argument in favour of capital punishment. Kill the killer lest he kill again. Lest he may, prevent. Prevent by making death the punishment. It has not been proven to work, in theory or in fact.
Perhaps I should use the contrary evidence. That the death penalty can be shown to have increased rather than decreased murders. Surprised eh? Here is the supporting evidence. It is a matter of fact that in New York, between 1907 and 1964, a period of 57 years, 692 executions were carried out. It is a matter of fact too, that over this 57 year period one or more executions in a given month was followed by a net increase of two murders to the total committed in the next month (Source: Bowers and Pierce, Deterrence or Brutalisation in Crime & Delinquency, 1980). No body of evidence contradicts the facts adduced here.
What then do I support. Considerable delay in carrying out final sentence in cases of murder is unavoidable. Murder trials take far longer than any other trial. That is a given. Post-conviction appeals are far more frequent than for any other conviction. Therefore, delay in executing sentence, cannot, repeat, cannot be considered cruel and inhumane punishment. On that I have made myself abundantly clear. And not even the Privy Council could write 1 or 1,000 pages refuting that argument.
What then would I replace the death penalty with – Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or commutation. For murder, one loses liberty for the rest of one’s living life, and society is protected from the possibility that the sentenced killer, will, if freed, kill again. The punishment would thus match the crime, not be the same as the crime, that is, an eye-for-an-eye, or a life for a life, really, murder for murder.
I have said enough. The pain of Arah’s cruel murder, by a man to whom we had extended kindness and social help, is probably eternal for myself and the children in particular, her mother, sisters and “Dada” inclusive. However, I always remember the day, when Arah gleefully said to me “Do you know that the four years Byers spent around us is the longest time he has spent out of prison since he was seven. We have done something, however small” she smiled her broad smile. That triumph was to end in a monstrous disaster.
In the end then, it was all to end so differently from what the heart arranged. One heart stopped permanently. Another was dislocated. As Ché, her eldest son has taken to remarking since “That’s life”. Rohan is irreconcilable, but he will turn his passion to creation in music. What’s done is done. However, in a truly human society, without race, class and sex domination and oppression, murder too, will pass. At any rate, that is a hope by which I live.
Last updated on 14 February 2022