Kelvin childs writes that the recommendation of the socio-cultural group like the Arewa Consultative Forum and odenigbo, to the National Assembly that corruption should attract death penalty evokes history of countries already applying it
If the recommendation of the socio-cultural group as parts of its contributions to the proposed amendments to the 1999 Constitution sails through, corrupt government officials must be prepared to pay with their lives for looting the public treasury.
The northern socio-cultural group on Tuesday, in its proposal submitted to the National Assembly, decried the level of graft in the country and recommended that anybody found culpable of corruption should be killed.
By the proposal, the group is obviously urging the country -- known to parade many dishonest political office holders -- to take a cue from some countries that have been applying the death penalty for financial crimes. In fact, some countries wield capital punishment even for sexual crimes like rape, adultery, incest and sodomy.
Countries such as the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore are exploring death penalty to curb corruption.
Not long ago, a former high-ranking official at China's top food and drug watchdog agency was sentenced to death not only for corruption but also for approving counterfeit drugs. Cao Wenzhuang, who until 2005 was in charge of drug registration approvals at the state Food and Drug Administration, was alleged to have accepted more than $300,000 in bribes from two pharmaceutical companies, thereby undermining public confidence in an agency supposedly protecting the nation's health.
He was sentenced by the No. one Intermediate Court in Beijing, less than two months after the same court sentenced Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the agency to death for accepting $850,000 in bribes to assist some drug companies scale through some approval processes.
Wenzhuang was, however, given the death sentence with a two-year reprieve, a seemingly lighter penalty that may allow him to commute the sentence to life in prison.
The list of crimes punishable by death in China is found in both the Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law, dating back to the 5th National People's Congress in 1979.
These crimes include counter-revolutionary crimes, such as organising an "armed mass rebellion"; endangering the public security and rape of a person under the age of 14. But it was during the 1980s, that "economic crimes" such as bribery, drug-trafficking and embezzlement were included in the legal code.
Also, death penalty in China extends to crimes against national symbols and treasures, ranging from theft of cultural relics. But executions for political crimes are rare.
As in China, the fear of capital punishment in Vietnam is the beginning of wisdom for crooked government officials. In the Southeast Asian country, death penalty is exclusively for individuals who commit serious crimes. It does not apply to juvenile offenders, pregnant women and women nursing children under 36 months old when the crime was committed or commencement of trial. Such cases however take life imprisonment in some cases.
Twenty-nine articles in the country's Penal Code indicate that the death penalty is an optional punishment and the executions are done by seven policemen as criminals are blindfolded and tied to stakes. But lethal injection replaced firing squad in November 2011 after the National Assembly passed the Law on Execution of criminal judgments.
And the country shows that the death penalty is not a paper tiger as corrupt persons bear the brunt. Recently, the Government of Vietnam sentenced to death a government official charged with graft. The 30-year-old Quang Khai was charged with the appropriation of 46,000 million dong (about $ 2.15 million) of deposits from the Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development of Vietnam. He worked for the department.
Under Vietnamese law, anyone who embezzles state assets worth over 500 million dong (around $ 24,000 or 18,600 Euros) risks 20 years to life imprisonment or death penalty.
Besides, before 2000, Taiwan experienced a relatively high execution rate when some strict laws were still in effect in the harsh political environment. But after some contentious cases during the 1990s, there was a drop in the number of executions, with only three recorded in 2005 and none between 2006 and 2009.
Execution, however, resumed in 2010, occasioned by the early burst of tough pro-capital punishment activities that year. Areas where death penalty applies include corruption, murder and offences concerning illegal weapons, drug crimes and terrorism. Hence, based on Article 2 Verse 1 of the country's Corruption Law, death penalty is only for people convicted for misappropriating funds for natural disasters, riots and economic crises.
Known to possess a corruption-free image, Singapore's use of capital punishment for serious crimes, including graft, has been criticised by the Amnesty International. But the government of the country always responds that it had the right being a sovereign state to impose the death penalty for serious offences.
An online source says capital punishment or death penalty is a legal process whereby a person is put to death by the state as a punishment for a crime. It adds, ''The judicial decree that someone be punished in this manner is a death sentence, while the actual process of killing the person is an execution.
Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences.''
Also, for offences other than graft, countries which had applied death penalty in the past include Hong Kong, Brazil, Bulgaria, Bhutan, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Austria, Australia, Ecuador, Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, Venezuela, Italy, Israel, Philippines, France, Turkey and Switzerland.
In the past, methods of carrying out the capital punishment ranged from burning, sawing, slow slicing, disembowelment, boiling to crushing. Now, decapitation, electrocution, gas chamber, hanging, firing squad, stoning and asphyxiation, currently being introduced, are the new ways.
But in his article titled, Corruption and the Death Penalty, the Global Coordinator, Champions for Nigeria, Akintokunbo Adejumo, said death penalty might not be the appropriate punishment for corrupt officials if is democracy the country indeed practices.
He noted that while we all condemn corruption, enacting laws that prescribe death penalty may be an overkill.
According to him, the right prescription is to have them prosecuted, recover all funds stolen and then have them serve time in prison.
He said, ''Furthermore, this will be more effective because no court in Nigeria will condemn anyone to death for corruption even if it was the law of the land. Capital punishment is particularly risky in Nigeria where the courts are ridden with corruption and, at times, politicking takes precedence over thorough investigations. The Nigerian judicial system has lots of problems with corruption and nepotism, so there is no guarantee that a sentence is objective.
Unfortunately, it is known that the extra-judicial killings and executions by the Police have been used as a way to avoid further investigation into serious crimes.''
