The President of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA), Nii Osah Mills, has called for the removal of the death penalty from the country’s statute books describing it as a cruel form of punishment that does not serve any good purpose. He said there was no need to keep that law since it was not being applied, pointing out that the GBA would consider initiating the process for its repeal in preference for a life sentence. Mr Mills said many jurisdictions in the world have repealed the law because there was evidence that capital punishment did not in any way prevent crime, "so we will even be going along with the worldwide trend if we reject the death penalty". The GBA President was sharing his thoughts with the Daily Graphic on Thursday on the administration or otherwise of capital punishment, which has generated public debate recently. The debate was revived last Tuesday, May 27, 2008, when Parliament vetted the four judges appointed to the Supreme Court by the President. At the vetting, one of the judges, Ms Justice Rose Constance Owusu, strongly defended capital punishment. According to her, there was no need to remove capital punishment from the statute books, since "he who kills needs to die". Ms Justice Owusu's conviction about the capital punishment was shared by another appointee to the Supreme Court, Mr Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie. Mr Mills said many lawyers might have divergent views on the issue and so it was not strange for a Supreme Court Judge in Ghana to support one side of the debate. He, however, made it clear that the GBA as a matter of policy did not believe in the death penalty because it was a cruel form of punishment. Mr Mills said the Biblical mantra: "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth", which underlined the conviction of death penalty advocates, belonged to the Old Testament, arguing that in the New Testament, Jesus Christ preached forgiveness, which formed the basis for repealing the death penalty. He said with the discovery of new forensic methods, it had been found out that many people who were executed and others on the death roll in the US and other parts of the world, should not have been given such punishment because new scientific evidence had proved them innocent. Mr Mills said he believed that during the Rawlings regime, for instance, when convicted armed robbers were executed, the objective was to clear armed robbers from the system, "but did we really clear the armed robbers from the system?" He said the essence of punishment was to deter people from committing crime and rehabilitate those found guilty of crime. But the question was whether capital punishment would prevent the reasons that led to the commission of crime. Mr Mills said there were many factors, including social and economic, that led to the commission of crime and so long as those factors existed, people would continue to commit crime. He said many states in America and other parts of the world had rejected the death penalty, “so we’ll not be going wrong if we also reject it”. The GBA President said it was an irony that whilst concerns against the death penalty were deepening, incidents of capital punishment via mob justice on the streets were on the increase. He said the situation was a great source of worry to the GBA because "it is like a symptom of the breakdown of law and order in the country and we have to tackle it vigorously". Mr Mills urged religious organisations, politicians, traditional authorities and opinion leaders to educate the public against meting out such a punishment to suspected criminals. Source: Daily Graphic