Public Execution is Not the Solution

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In 1772, a young girl who had killed her employer was sentenced to death in Cambrai, France. But that was not it: she was to be taken to the site of execution on a cart used to collect rubbish; she was to sit on the same chair that her mistress was sitting on at the time of the murder; her right hand was to be cut off and burned; and then she was to receive four blows with the execution weapon — two on the head, one of the left hand and one on the chest. This was followed by her being hung and strangled to death. Two hours after that, she was to be decapitated and her head hung on a twenty feet high pole for the rest of the day.

This horrifying account is narrated in French Philosopher Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In this book, Foucault argues that in the west, severe punishments were a public spectacle; torture was almost always a part of the investigation, and punishment was inextricably linked to the body of the culprit to inflict maximum pain. No wonder, the book argues, that such gruesome punishments gained widespread endorsement and were ubiquitous in the west in the early modern period. Hanging, amputation or mutilation before being hanged, being burnt alive or posthumously, being starved to death or flogged and killed — inhumane by modern standards — were the run-of-the-mill punishments of that age.

The recent pandemonium in Pakistan brings Foucault’s book to mind. On September 10, 2020, a woman from Lahore in her early 30s, along with her two children, was travelling on the Gujranwala-Lahore motorway, notoriously unsafe for travelling with no police patrolling, gas stations and a no service area. The woman’s car ran out of fuel around 1 am. She pulled over and tried to arrange help. Two men approached her and took her and her two children to the nearby fields at gunpoint. The broken window glasses of the vehicle were the explicit signs of resistance from the woman. Once in the field, the men brutally raped her in front of her children. By the time the police and a relative of the woman reached the spot, the assailants had fled with the victims’ valuable possessions.

The news of the atrocity attracted a massive public outpouring of support and solidarity for the victims — the woman who was violated and the two children who were forced to watch the entire episode. Activists, journalists, politicians, celebrities, national and international human rights organizations and the general public alike condemned the incident in the strongest terms and demanded that the perpetrators be punished in the most gruesome way, ostensibly to make an example of them for would-be sex offenders. Thousands of indignant Pakistanis took to the streets and the social media to demand justice for the victims. The cries for the public execution of the culprits were ubiquitous — public hanging, decapitation, tearing the limbs off, flaying them or placing a bunch of ravenous rats on them which, with no other way of escaping, would burrow their way through their bodies and excruciatingly kill them. Even the premier of the country said that rapists must receive severe punishments to curb sexual violence in the country — like publicly hanging or chemically castrating them. The federal cabinet on Tuesday endorsed the PM’s views on public execution, saying that “Islam guides us to give punishment to rapists publicly” and vowing that the government wouldn’t succumb to any pressure from the west. Why? Because the west is a little civilized and civility… well, it’s just not our thing. It seems that the prime minister of Pakistan and his underlings need a crash course on the criminal justice system and ethics.

Public executions — why don’t they work?

‘Criminal barbarity can only be countered with barbarity by the state’ is the perception that fuels the uproar for public executions. There’s this anachronic and long-debunked idea that such flagrant displays of savagery would deter individuals from committing crimes and defying the authorities in the future. This is hardly new: every time a rape case receives adequate media attention, these cries resurface; the proponents, possessed by hindsight bias, once again advocate for the public execution of the criminals, arguing that they “saw it coming.” “This is the only solution”, they fervidly claim. But not everyone is on the same page. The abolitionists point, time and again, that public executions — or capital punishment for that matter — do not deter crime. Abolitionists attract widespread condemnation, obviously. “What if it had happened to your sister? Would you then oppose it?” is the common rejoinder.

But like many other mainstream ideas in our culture, this is plainly false! Public executions do not deter crime. Historically, such grotesque executions were public events, attended by large crowds — few hundred in normal cases, several thousand for notorious criminals or the high-muck-a-mucks of the society. In extreme cases, the victims were burned/boiled to death, flayed, quartered or empaled. In the more run-of-the-mill, not-so-serious crimes, the perpetrators would either be publicly decapitated, stoned, crucified, or simply hanged and then left to rot in the sun. Throughout the modern period — and with the wider acknowledgement of human rights — public executions were banned in several countries. Last half of the 20th century witnessed a heated debate on whether public executions should be televised or not — most chose against it. Since the mid-1990s, public executions have been reported in some 20 countries, including China, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Nigeria and Iran, despite the practice being condemned as “incompatible with human dignity” by the United Nations.

In Pakistan, public execution — a grisly form of capital punishment — has many opponents, but zillions of proponents. The champions of public execution put their arguments this way: by committing a heinous crime such as rape or murder, the culprit has forfeited his right of life, and, therefore, he should be killed in the most ghastly of ways so that the would-be offenders learn their lesson. But this is explicitly counterproductive in the message it conveys: encouraging and legitimizing the very behaviour it intends to contain — murder and rape — hardly seems fruitful. If used for minor crimes, it is immoral because it is wholly disproportionate to the harm done. Capital punishments, even in its low-key and concealed form, is an infraction of human dignity; it violates the condemned person’s fundamental right to life and is, therefore, inhumane and degrading.

The proponents also argue that public executions are a unique and potent deterrence against potential offenders for whom the threat of life imprisonment just doesn’t suffice. Prodigious analytical studies and research point otherwise: public executions are not, in any way, more deterrent than alternative punishments. If anything, they encourage it — a sensationalist public execution normalises violence and barbarity, and adds to the social bloodlust. Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British author who argued for the abolition of the death penalty altogether, wrote about the time when pickpockets were publicly executed in England in the 18th and 19th century. The very act that was intended as a crime deterrent helped it fester: other pickpockets took advantage of the gathering to “prove their mastery among the crowd surrounding the scaffold on which their fellow was hung.” In 1886, out of 167 men were sentenced for public execution in Bristol prison, 164 had witnessed at least one public execution. But it seems that the spectacle didn’t deter their criminal proclivity even in the slightest. Instead, it perpetuated it.

Public executions are a short-term palliative solution, not to sex offences, but our social bloodlust. Iran and Saudi Arabia are two countries where public executions are legal, but despite the frequent executions for crimes such as homicide and rape, sex- and drug-related offences and murder rates have only risen. In the myopic and heavily restrained culture of Pakistan, public executions would only suppress the reporting of sexual offences, not the offence itself. More than 80% of the incidents of child abuse in this country are carried out by relatives, acquaintances and people of ‘trust’, known to the victim or his/her family. In such cases, when the perpetrator (most likely a person known by or related to the family) will be publicly executed in utmost humiliation, the family members would be prone to keep their mouth shut — voluntarily or under duress. The fear of public execution may motivate the perpetrator to end the life of his victim, mitigating the risk of identification and conviction. Only 3% of reported sex offences in this country are convicted, not to mention the unfathomable number of unreported cases. Implementation of public execution would further aggravate the already pitiful under-reporting of sex offences, encouraging the crime and inflicting additional trauma on the victim.

To assess the efficacy of public executions, let’s take a look back into undeniably the worst period of Pakistan’s history: Zia’s regime. All the recent cries of the public execution of the Motorway gang-rape incident were justified in the light of General Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorial regime, in which the reported cases of sexual offences were indeed lower, but we’ll get to that in a sec. Zia legalized public executions in the 1980s under the popular theme — the severer the punishment, the greater the deterrent effect. Several criminals were publicly hanged in Mianwali, Gujranwala, Sahiwal, Faisalabad and Lahore between 1985 to 1988 when the General died in a mysterious plane crash. The punishment was soon abandoned after the restoration of democracy in 1988, as it had miserably failed to deliver any social good.

Following are few news clippings about the public hangings in Zia’s regime, sifted from the library of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan:

But if public executions failed to deliver any social good, then how were the cases of sexual offence so low? The answer is Hudood Ordinances. A part of Zia’s abortive Islamization enterprise, Hudood Ordinances only perpetuated sexual offences in Pakistan. Under the Zina Ordinance, “at least four Muslim adult male witnesses” that had witnessed the act of carnal intercourse and about whom “the court is satisfied” that “they are truthful persons and abstain from major sins” were mandatory to punish the culprit. The baneful effect of the Zina Ordinance crystallized in 1983 when a blind teenage girl named Safia Bibi was raped. The court asked her to identify the rapists, but being blind, she couldn’t. She’d gotten pregnant, and pregnancy was considered a proof of fornication. Resultantly, she was incriminated for adultery, sentenced to be publicly flogged and then imprisoned. Asima Jahangir, a human rights lawyer, nominee for Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 and the co-founder of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, defended the girl. After several rounds of protests, the girl was spared the lashes.

The stringent standards of the Ordinances gave significant freedom to the perpetrators to commit the crime with the utmost impunity and get away with it. Zia’s regressive policies made it practically impossible to prove rape. Who was he going to execute when 99% of the incidents of sexual misconduct couldn’t be justly prosecuted? No one. Resultantly, the reported incidents of sexual offences fell, not because the system fluidly delivered justice to the victims and quelled sexual offences, but because it suppressed them from attaining it.

Let’s take a look at a more recent example: the execution of Zainal Ansari’s rapist and murderer, Imran Ali. Despite Mr Ansari’s judicial request for the public hanging of the criminal, Imran Ali was executed within the walls of the Kot Lakhpat Jail, Lahore, in 2018. His execution was public in the sense that it was inescapable from the national conversation. All cries for revenge, the public execution and the execution itself did not deter the future round of rapes and killings, or cushion the emotional blow to the victim’s family — they only satisfied the outrage of the people. According to the child rights organization Sahil, there was an 11% increase in the reported cases of child sex abuse that year.

The ghastly Motorway gang-rape incident has exposed, once again, the failure of law enforcement and legal systems of Pakistan. Our leadership must understand that what happened to the victim of the motorway incident was not because the rapists had sexual desires, but because of the inability of our law enforcement agencies to provide security to citizens, and the failure of the legal system to deliver comeuppance to the criminals. The perpetrators of the motorway incident were reportedly involved in multiple crimes in the past, including gang rapes, but never prosecuted. They were either bailed or released by the courts. The police had failed to track them down. Instead of conceding their inability, the Lahore police chief, Umer Sheikh, instead opted for victim-blaming. “Why was she out on the Motorway so late without a brother or husband? Why didn’t she check her gas tank before leaving the house? And if she had to travel why didn’t she take the more public GT Road route?” he touted. Sheikh’s callous remarks earned him widespread national condemnation, forcing him to apologize and retract his comments. But like every apology issued under duress, it was hollow. Such apologies follow a similar pattern — one makes an insensitive comment, then apologizes that their comments or intentions were ‘misunderstood’ and that people were ‘upset’ by their remarks, without acknowledging that the remarks themselves were unbecoming. This culture of victim-blaming and impunity is what makes women insecure in this country.

If not public executions, then what?

But if public executions do not deter sexual offences, then what does? Well, there is no single answer. Experts have been advocating for multiple solutions for years, like an open conversation about sex, teaching the difference between ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’ to children at a young age, making sure that consent is a permanent part of the curriculum, that chapters on human reproductive system are not slit, glued and taped in science books, and that the courses about sexual offences are not being taught separately to male and female students in university-level law classes. It is mandatory that the fluent reporting of sexual offences be encouraged; hotlines should be established for children’s and adults’ cases throughout the country; the identity of the victims must be kept confidential in court hearings; there must be better and more available forensics, based on reliable, advanced techniques such as DNA testing; and more female medico-legal officers and police personnel be recruited. There is a massive need to rethink and reinvent the law enforcement and legal systems to ensure better reporting and prosecution of the cases.

Sex education is perhaps the best way to counter the rising incidents of sexual offences. Thanks to our anachronic and parochial outlook on sex, our knowledge of sexual matters is practically nil. Let me divulge one aspect of it: in rural areas, couples marry young, partly due to traditional customs and tribal conventions, and partly due to Pakistan’s malleable marital laws. Being young, the brides cannot conceive immediately after the marriage. The groom takes this as an affront to his masculinity. He has to prove his sexual prowess and virility to his family, relatives and the rest of the tribe. A pregnant wife is satisfactory evidence, and when she can’t get pregnant, she is miserably beaten.

In Pakistan, men are quite sensitive and insecure about their sexual prowess. Male virgins are so insecure and low on self-esteem that they fear any sexual relation with a woman, fearing that they might fail in bed. They dread that an unsatisfactory sexual experience will always remain a blot on their identity. So instead, they try their sexual prowess on persons who are unable to resist and refuse or report a failure or launch complaints — children. And that’s how child sexual abuse festers. Sex education can spread awareness of such sensitive sex-related issues and alleviate the risks of a sexual offence.