By Dr. P. G. Punchihewa
Of the former Ceylon Civil Service

July 2, 2019, 9:08 pm 

(A shorter version of this article appeared in the Sunday Island August 5,2018)

Why do we kill people who kill people to show people that killing people is wrong? — R. Chandrasoma

Since the announcement was made by the government recently to reintroduce the capital punishment much has been written in support or against the move.

But I wonder whether there is anybody from either group who would have seen the penalty being implemented and convicts executed? There are two such reports from two officials who witnessed the event.

Let me reproduce them. The first from Chandrasoma as reported in his “Vignettes of the Ceylon Civil Service 1938 -1957” and the second from Leonard Woolf in his autobiography “Growing”. I quote from Chandrasoma first as it gives the background for his presence at the execution.

“Why do we kill people who kill people to show people that killing people is wrong? The cadet had to officiate at every fifth hanging. The GA took the first, the AGA the second, the OA third, the Extra OA the fourth and if you were the cadet, [it was] your baby. Mine had been three days ago. I was given two days’ notice of my ordeal ….

“Representing the fiscal I was the last to speak to the condemned man. He was a Tamil from an estate in the district and it was some little consolation to me that I then had not enough Tamil to speak to him except through an interpreter. In the cold Kandy dawn, he was in a sweat shivering and his teeth chattering, as he stood at the door of the condemned cell. I was in little better state. I had to ask him whether he was the man condemned to death in the Supreme Court in case number so and so, presumably to make sure that the wrong man was not killed. He nodded speechlessly It was then my duty to ask him whether he wished to make a will, make any disposition, or convey any message to anybody. That was the sum of it and then I stepped back to see him hooded and walked to the gallows. I had finally to witness and certify that he was duly hanged by the neck till he was dead.

“I scratched my signature on the official paper and staggered away. Despite the superintendent of the prison telling me the grisly details of how this man had hacked his young wife to death and showing me the knife with which the deed was done in a vain attempt to help me regain my composure, I had not been able to eat and sleep.” (Pages 2-3) This was in 1938.

Woolf’s account in his biography “Growing” is more detailed and gruesome.

“In Kandy executions took place in the Bogambara Prison in the early morning before breakfast. To be present at them was a horrifying experience and the more I had to witness, the more horrible I found them – and I think this was the experience of almost everyone who had to be present … The procedure was that I first went to the condemned man’s cell, read over to him the warrant of execution, and asked him whether he had anything to say. Some said no; several of them asked that their bodies after execution should be handed to their relatives. After I read the warrant, the condemned man was led out of the cell, clothed in white, on his head a curious white hat which at the last moment was drawn down to hide his face. In most cases they seemed to be quite unmoved as they walked to the scaffold, but one man in a state of terror and collapse and had to be almost carried to the gallows by the warders and all the way he kept repeating some words of a Sinhalese, prayer, over and over again, and even as he stood with the rope round his neck waiting for the drop. The man was led on to the scaffold by the warders, his arms were pinioned, and the hat drawn over his face. I had to stand immediately facing him on a kind of verandah where I could see the actual hanging. In two out of the six or seven hangings which I had to certify something went wrong.

In one case the man appeared not to die immediately; the body went on twitching violently and the executioner went and pulled on the legs. In the other case four men had to hang one morning and they were hanged two by two. The first two were hanged correctly, but either they gave one of the second two too big a drop or something else went wrong for his head was practically torn from his body and a great jet of blood spurted up three or four feet, covering the gallows and the priest praying on the steps.

“I give these repulsive details because those who support capital punishment in the 20th century pretend that it is a necessary, humane, civilized form of punishment. As a form of punishment, it is disgusting and as I saw it disgustingly inefficient. From the point of view of society and criminology, in my opinion, it is completely useless. The men whom I saw executed had all committed unpremeditated crimes of violence, killing from passion, anger or in a quarrel. Not one of them was deterred from killing by the fact that hundreds of other men in Ceylon had been hanged for precisely similar killings. All the evidence, in all countries and at all times goes to show that capital punishment is not a deterrent of crime; in fact ,by the mystique horror which creates it tends to induce the crimes for which men have recently been executed.” — p 167 and 168 (italics mine)

This was in 1905. The CCS cadets who came after 1958, appreciated the humane decision taken by the then Minister of Justice , M. W. H. de Silva, who did away with the capital punishment as they did not have to go through the agony of witnessing a human being hanged in their presence as Chadrasoma and Woolf explained above.