Earlier this year, Dame Lois Browne Evans made a rather odd comment. During a meeting of the Bermuda Independence Commission, she suggested that Independence could pave the way for the reintroduction of capital and corporal punishment, should an independent Bermuda decide to replace the Privy Council with the Caribbean Court of Justice.

?Some of the islands in Jamaica don?t want the Privy Council any more, or in the Caribbean, because they don?t believe in hanging,? said Dame Lois. ?[The Privy Council has been overturning all these appeals on hanging for the last ten, 15 or 20 years now and it?s gotten under the skin of some attorney generals and some of those islands who believe like Bermudians, bring back the whip, bring back the cat-o-nine-tails, bring back hanging.?

It was a strange thing for Dame Lois to say given her own feelings about the death penalty. When the PLP abolished capital and corporal punishment in 1999 she said that these forms of punishment hearkened back to the barbarisms of slavery and the colonial era, and that it was ?time for us to stop treating wrong-doers as if they were animals?.

Do Bermudians really want to bring back hanging? If they still feel the way they did in 1990, perhaps they do. In a referendum that year, 78 percent voted to retain capital punishment for premeditated murder, although only one-third of the electorate turned out.

The subject will be in the news again the week after next. On Monday, October 10, the World Coalition against the Death Penalty, an umbrella organisation, is organising a World Day against the Death Penalty. This year it?s dedicated to abolition in Africa.

I have never been comfortable with the idea of state-sponsored executions, even for the most egregious of crimes. Mainly, it?s the prospect of accidentally executing the wrong person. In the UK, the Birmingham Six were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for two pub bombings that killed 21 people; the Guildford Four were convicted of another pub bombing in the same year. It later emerged that their convictions were unsafe; all were eventually cleared and released. Although they had served 15 or more years in prison, had they been executed no amends could have been made.

Some supporters of the death penalty argue that more innocents have been killed by released or paroled murderers than have been executed. They say that the death penalty is the only guaranteed way to prevent a murderer from killing again. They?re wrong. Imprisonment without parole for the length of the murderer?s natural life would achieve the same effect.

I have often wondered whether support for capital punishment would drop if everyone had to watch the executions, particularly the ones that go wrong. When Bert Leroy Hunter was executed by lethal injection in Missouri in 2000, he suffered a violent and agonising death, convulsing, coughing and gasping for air. When Frank Coppola was electrocuted, it took two 55-second jolts to kill him, producing a sizzling sound and the smell of burning flesh; his head and leg caught on fire. Botched hangings can behead the prisoner.

A fitting end, those from the ?eye for an eye? school of justice might think. But that isn?t justice, it?s revenge.

Worse, there?s little evidence that the death penalty deters others. It may even make juries less likely to convict if they know that the defendant will lose his life as a result. This would probably be a particular problem in close-knit Bermuda.

Nevertheless, there have been calls to reintroduce the death penalty here to stem Bermuda?s rising level of violent crime. Last year, Shadow Home Affairs Minister Maxwell Burgess suggested that he would be prepared to bring an amendment to reinstate capital punishment. Shadow Deputy Leader John Barritt said that he too would like to see the death penalty back on the books. ?[Mr. Burgess reflects a sentiment not only within our party but in the community,? he said. ?The challenge is how to do it.?

If that?s true, then the UBP and the community are out of touch with the way the capital punishment debate is going. In 1977 only 16 countries had abolished capital punishment for all crimes. Today, 80 countries have done so. Every year since 1997, the UN Commission on Human Rights has passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions in those countries that have not abolished the death penalty; a record 81 states sponsored this year?s resolution, five more than in 2004.

In 1998, in a letter to the Bermuda Sun, Eugene Carmichael pointed out that the further we are from a crime, the easier it is to condemn, but the closer we are, the easier it is to lose our objectivity. He proposed a better test for us to judge how we really feel about capital punishment: would we favour the death penalty for premeditated murder if both the murderer and the victim were our loved ones?

Bermuda made the right decision when it abolished the death penalty. It should never look back.www.limeyinbermuda.com