It was unfortunate to read the comments of Attorney General Allyson Maynard-Gibson in this newspaper on Tuesday. Rather than emphasizing to Bahamians that the death penalty is finished in The Bahamas and that we should move on from it, she was going on about how the bureaucratic process in the criminal justice system could be improved to ensure the punishment is carried out.

"... Now it is challenging to define the worst of the worst. What we have to do is in my view, rather than allow the delays to set in, keep pushing. I think it's easy for things to collapse after a conviction and appeals that have been filed to get thrown back some place," she said.

The attorney general addressed the opening of the Eugene Dupuch Law School Education Week at the Harry C. Moore Library on Monday.

The Nassau Guardian is opposed to the death penalty. We already have a problem with killings in The Bahamas. State-sanctioned executions will not help solve our crime problem, which is particularly situated in New Providence.

Instead of applying our minds to speedier ways to kill our citizens, we must find ways to get our young people engaged with the world of achievement and peaceful conflict resolution from childhood to adulthood. We must reform our criminal justice system to ensure that people who commit crimes are effectively prosecuted in a timely manner and incarcerated for appropriate terms. We must work to increase our economic growth rate so that there are more jobs and opportunities to keep people engaged in productive activity. We must fix our public education system.

Rulings by the Privy Council, our highest court, over the years have made the death penalty all but abolished in The Bahamas. Judges do not sentence people to death anymore. The last execution in The Bahamas - that of David Mitchell - took place in 2000.

The attorney general should be pushing for legislation to abolish the death penalty. Executions are irreversible and exonerations are common in criminal cases. People we call guilty the day the jury brings back a verdict often are set free years later by appellate courts. A life sentence is no more lenient than an execution. Yet, it provides a glimpse of opportunity for an innocent man to clear his name.

The death penalty is particularly unfair because in jurisdictions where it is applied the sentence is disproportionately given to the poor, the uneducated, the under-represented, the mentally challenged and minorities.

Our focus should be on building up our people. Our focus should be on investing in young people, especially those from low-income communities. If we get better at this there will be fewer murders, shootings and robberies. We must move away from this lust to kill our own.

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