Money equals life, right?

The simplistic argument is simple enough that even a child can see the A to B to C of it all: all crime can be wiped out if the penalty is death. Simple. Straightforward. No muss, no fuss. Done deal! However...

The United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, that swathe of territory controlled by the Islamic State and China routinely execute capital offenders. Sometimes the United States even stands behind the decision to execute mentally disordered persons, after all, a capital offender, sane or not, has to die to balance the scales of justice. Sometimes it executes people who committed their capital offences when they were children; the evangelical argument that all children are innocent does not apply once you hit puberty, it seems.

Kenya has had a moratorium on the death penalty for twenty six years, but capital offences continue to be created and capital punishment continues to be decreed by the High Court, upheld by the Court of Appeal and, if the Supreme Court does what the Supreme Court of the United States has done, will be upheld as a just punishment by the State. Kenya's death rows, in other words, continue to swell with inmates undergoing, in effect, life sentences without the chance of release.

Someone has proposed that "economic crimes" be made capital crimes and that offenders should either be executed by the State or imprisoned for life. Unless you are looking for it, you won't see it. What the proposer is declaring, without the benefit of a national debate on the ethics and morality of it, is that when someone commits an economic crime - vandalism of a strategic asset, for example - that is the equivalent of murder or treason. (I don't believe treason should be punishable by death, and I have trouble accepting that murderers are beyond redemption, but those are settled offences for which the pitilessness of the State has been accepted.)

We are set our feet on the slippery slope of the State killing people over money. It almost always boils down to money when it comes to the State, but we have always accepted that we do not measure lives in terms of money and that the greater common good is not a balanced accountant's ledger. Sure, the State through our government collects taxes for which it builds roads, hospitals, electricity transmission systems and the like, but it also guarantees our safety and security whose benefits are not a series of zeroes in a bank account. With the declaration that economic crimes are capital crimes and that the punishment must be death, we seem to be crossing a line that we never knew existed.

I am not a seer. I cannot read tea leaves and predict your future. I am not a soothsayer. Nor, I suspect, are many of you. But there are few scarier things in the affairs of men than to declare that money equals life, for that is what this proposal does. Money and life are on the same plane at last. And while the economic crimes we contemplate for now are the big ones, eventually even schemes to avoid tax will be capital offences, Ponzi schemes will be capital offences, and bankruptcy or insolvency will be capital offences.

We don't really know why Kenya has a moratorium on capital punishment. Perhaps it is time we debated the question. Perhaps it is time we decided whether we trusted the agents of the State and the institutions of government to investigate capital offences effectively and kill the right people should the courts justly convict them.