RIGHTS-SWAZILAND: Method of Execution Changed to Lethal Injection

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MBABANE, Jan 21 2002 (IPS) - A 19-year stand-off between opponents of capital punishment and a majority of Swazis who favour the death sentence may soon end as the method for execution is changed from death by hanging to lethal injection.

“Injections do not need to be administered by a specialist but only by a qualified medical practitioner, and we will probably be introducing the system this year,” says justice minister Maweni Simelane.

For years, the excuse given for not putting to death the dozen inmates on death row is that the tiny kingdom had no hangman.

In 1998, the justice ministry took out adverts in international publications requesting applicants for the post. Reportedly, dozens of interested candidates sent enquiries to the ministry, though none had actual experience as executioners.

“Swazis do not like this kind of work, so we must go abroad for a hangman,” Simelane said at the time.

When no candidate was accepted, the Human Rights Association of Swaziland, which condemns capital punishment as cruel and pointless, suggested the Swazi government was reluctant to execute prisoners for fear of attracting attention to the kingdom’s human rights record.

The kingdom’s rights record has been criticised by pro- democracy groups because of royal decrees proscribing opposition politics and restricting freedom of expression and assembly.

“Capital punishment solves nothing. It is all about revenge,” says the group’s president, Joshua Mzizi, a theologian at the University of Swaziland, whose campus is two kilometres from the Matsapha Maximum Security Prison, home of the death row inmates.

Two events last year sparked renewed debate about the death penalty, which has been abolished in South Africa and Mozambique, neighbouring countries that surround landlocked Swaziland. The first was a report presented to King Mswati by his constitutional review commission that indicated a majority of Swazis favour capital punishment.

“Swazis want to see the death sentence written into a new constitution,” said commission chairperson Mangaliso Dlamini.

Pro-democracy groups have dismissed the palace-initiated constitution writing exercise as a way for royalty to permanently enshrine monarchial power (the new constitution will continue a ban on opposition politics). But anecdotal evidence and informal polls of Swazis show sentiment toward capital punishment runs high.

“We are a conservative society, and we believe in the Biblical punishment of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” says Reverend Alpheus Dlamini of the African Evangelical Church.

Then, on Nov 13, King Mswati evoked the royal Prerogative of Mercy, and commuted the death sentences of four convicted murderers to life sentences, reducing the number of death row inmates from 13 to nine.

Each of the four, who had been awaiting their executions since 1982, the year before the last hanging took place in Swaziland, will be released from prison when he turns 75 years old.

“They had been in suspense for two decades, wondering when they’d die, and this was a form of cruel and unusual punishment,” wrote a commentator with the Times of Swaziland.

With government undecided whether to perform executions or not, observers felt the king had no choice but to release the convicts from their suspense.

If Simelane’s schedule holds true for a resumption of executions this year, when the hangman’s rope is replaced with a poison-filled syringe, then time is running out for the remaining prisoners, some of whom also have been on death row since the 1980s.

The justice ministry’s assertion that due to cultural beliefs about death, no Swazi was interested in the hangman’s job was disproved last year when a prison worker told the newspapers upon his retirement that for 30 years he washed and handled executed prisoners after they were hung.

“The hangman only tied the noose, and sprung the trap door. I could have done that,” he said.

Simelane told the Times that “anyone can do a lethal injection, it does not take any special training.” He implied that there would be no problem finding Swazis to do the task.

The Swaziland Nurses Association is preparing a statement calling upon its members to refuse to participate in executions, and reminding doctors of their Hippocratic oath that forbids a medical practitioner from harming a human life.

“Doctors serving at government hospitals and clinics are employees of the ministry of health, not the department of correctional services, so they cannot be ordered to administer lethal injections,” says a nurse at RFM hospital, the nearest major medical facility to the Matsapha prison.

Certainly, any resumption of executions would be met by the same candlelit protests witnessed in the United States and other places where prisoner executions take place.

Bishop Ncamiso Ndlovu, who heads Swaziland’s Roman Catholic denomination, says he will lead the protests. “It is God’s prerogative to take a human life that only he has given. It is not man’s to do,” he says.

The Swaziland Law Society, noting the imperfect police and detective work in the country, is wary of capital punishment because of the possibility — some attorneys say “likelihood” — of innocent people wrongly convicted being put to death.

“We don’t even have DNA technology in Swaziland to help determine guilt or innocence, but it seems we have access to the latest execution technology,” says a Mbabane attorney.

With crime escalating in Swaziland — last week a police officer was shot dead and one of King Mswati’s palace advisors was wounded by gunmen robbing a club near the Matsapha prison — Swazis seem more eager to find ways to ensure their safety than to debate the morality of capital punishment.

“The discovery of the bodies of 45 women and children killed by Swaziland’s first mass-murderer last year has also frightened people, and they are demanding revenge,” says Vusie Ginindza, editor of the Times Sunday.

Ginindza is a co-founder of the Editors Forum, which called for a resumption of executions after another of the group’s founders, Swazi Observer editor Sandile Ntshangase, was gunned done in a thrill killing by youths in October last year.

The debate may be ended by the thrust of a lethal needle within months.