Lately, with great concern and anger, we have been helpless witnesses to execution of death sentence of prisoners, even in the 'noble and civilized' United States.
There is a waiting list of approximately three-thousand executions. The dath penalty, in its macabre and varied forms and applications, seems to have became a dramatic current event.
he International Community's submission to this unheard-of legalized violence is quite surprising.
Surprising and horrifying is the silence of those who should have the obligation to raise their voice and condemn, without half measures, this barbarity, which goes against the most basic of human rights.
PRISON DOCTORS WORLDWIDE, JOINED IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS IN PISA, SAY NO TO THE DEATH PENALTY AND JOINLY APPEAL TO THE MOST IMPORTANT INTERNATIONAL BODIES TO REQUEST THAT THEY SET ASIDE THEIR GEOPOLITICAL TACTISISMS AND INTERVENE WITH GREAT DETERMINATION ON THE GOVERNMENTS OF THOSE COUNTRIES WHOSE LEGAL INSTRUMENTS INCLUDE THIS UNCIVILIZED, DESPICABLE, ANACRONISTIC, BARBARIC EXPEDIENT.
Please be assured that this battle for a civil right shell be a priority for my term of office as President of the ICPMS and shall be fought incessantly and with every means, without stopping in front of anything.
I wish to remind everyone that every time an AMERICAN PRISON DOCTOR takes the word in PRISON MEDICINE CONGRESSES, they first apologize to everyone for those grave things which still take place in thei country. It is an absolute paradox that if a convict has a temperature, he or she cannot be executed. The AMERICAN PRISON DOCTOR must intervene to curehim or her and only then the prisoner can be sent to the electrical chair in full physical integrity. All this cause us to shudders. I leave you to imagine, only for an instant, the psychologicalcconditions in which this PRISON DOCTOR comes to find himself when he realizes that healing a patient means accelerating his or her death.
THE PRISON DOCTORS ESPECIALLY ADDRESS THE U.N.O. AND THE EUROPEAN COUNCIL with the purpose of representing the strongest dissent from the offence of the dignity of the human being.
There are intangible rights, but the death penalty denie them at the root.
We cannot watch, in silence, this trial of strnght of man over man.
Deep within our conscience, we must find the strenght to rebel, above all we PRISON DOCTORS, because we are witnesses of the prisons' chasm.
We PRISON DOCTORS WORLWIDE are firmly convinced that man is not, and can never be or became, a beast to be tamed or a target to be hit and destroyed. Prisoners are not spoiled apples to be thrown away.
The death penalty has no underlying intimidating value.
This is proved by concerning increase in crime in the UNITED STATES where 1.250.000 prisoners are packed into prisons.
It is proved by the fact that none of the European countries that have recently abolished the death penalty, have seen an increase in serious crimes.
The death penalty is useless and ineffective.
Moreover, the interval between the death sentence and the execution is often very long.
lt is the public show of prolonged death offered by the government. The convict is caught between the hope to live and the need to prepare for dcatlt death, everything that this situation implies in terms of psychological and emotional suffering.
I still remember, with vivid emotion, when I visited the maximum security prison in Harare, where I was allowed to meet with 22 prisoners who were waiting to be executed by shooting.
In short, we can conclude that the death penalty represents an outlet for society's miserable vengeance. In fact, what sense of justice is satisfied by sending a convict to death? It is an unheard of atrocity, an extreme barbarity, a senseless and cruel penalty, because the identity and personality of the prisoner must not be fixed forever in a non-rnodifiable state, as regards legal profile and qualification of the committed crime, without considering any derogation to the transformation and to the changing of the soul.
The death penalty is not only about men and women who are killed, but is also the concrete application of ani ethico-juridical principle, that principle by which a government can legitimately decide to put an end to an individual life.
By looking at the list of alcoholics, mentally handicapped. and every sort of outcast who end up in the gas chambers or who are killed by lethal injection, we feel as if we are before a disinfesting power - a 'gardening' authority, as the power responsible for weeding has been defined.
Last, among the victims of capital punishment, there are victims of political or religious persecution - people who are sometimes "guilty" only of offence of opinion and who have not used or incited anyone to use violence.
Based on these circumstances, we are legitimately rnake a consideration, which is that the death penalty in certain countries is a discriminating and arbitrary tool, while it is certain that in other countries it is used as a means of repression.
To demand that the victim' blood be washed by that of the other men is false justice.
Punishment by the death penalty is only the survival of the archaic law of the retaliation: since you have killed, also you must die.
The macabre script (electric chair, lethal injection, hanging, shooting) of capital punishment represents the sacrificing ritual of a legal homicide. And what can we say about those convicts who are put to death and who are later proved innocent?
In these cases, it is society, even if it is in the name of the rights it has bestowed upon itself, which has committed an irreparable crime.
And what can we say about what happens in China, where the doctors are forced to explant vital organs from executed prisoners and to forward them to a shameful black market?
In 1999, in China, 1263 death sentences were carried out (more than all the death sentences in the rest of the world). Recently, a Chinese doctor fled abroad, has reported having been in charge, for many years, of cutting the skin off the arms, legs, chest, and backs of every shot prisoner. The skin was kept in a saline solution at low temperature for later use on victims of severe burns.
We raise our cry of protest so that the unalienable rights of a prisoner may be safeguarded in any part of the world.
Contemporary societies have suitable means for defending people against crime without having to break the sacred principle of human life.
It is a basic rule of civilization.