THE EDITOR, Sir:
YOUR WEEKLY polls on your website ask the question: "Will hanging cut the rate of murders?" Execution by hanging was the most popular legal and extra-legal form of putting criminals to death in Jamaica from its beginning. Brought over to Jamaica from our English ancestors, the method actually originated in Persia (now Iran) about 2,500 years ago. Hanging soon became the method of choice for most countries, including Jamaica, as it produced a highly visible deterrent by a simple method.
PUBLIC SPECTACLE
It also made a good public spectacle, considered important during those times, as viewers looked above them to the gallows or tree to watch the punishment. Legal hangings, practised by the early English colonists, were readily accepted by the public as a proper form of punishment for serious crimes like theft, rape, and murder.
Death penalty advocates tout execution as a deterrent to crime and violence in Jamaica, and maybe it is in some respects. The horror story of the rape and murder of a young girl in Kingston, the two other young girls, who were found raped and murdered in a cane field in the Town Head district in Burnt Savannah, Westmoreland, will serve mostly as a sad reminder that we need to re-introduce capital punishment in Jamaica, but not in the form of hanging, please.
Lethal injection is a method of capital punishment. It gained popularity in the twentieth century as a supposedly humane form of execution meant to supplant methods such as electrocution, hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, or decapitation.
I am, etc.,
COTTRELL HYATT
chyatt@postmaster.co.uk
London E9 7RR
