This last Tuesday night, the US state of Georgia killed a woman by lethal injection for the murder of her husband 18 years ago. The judicial killing went ahead despite a number of pleas for mercy, including one made on behalf of Pope Francis himself.

As usual with such events, the debate over capital punishment was refuelled all over the United States and beyond, old arguments dug up and dusted and sent out to support one side or the other of the divide.

Does killing those who kill stop killing (deterrent), or is it just to satisfy our all too human urge to do unto others what others have done unto us (revenge)?

These are tough questions and in many parts of the world where their pros and cons have been considered the jury is still out. The intensity of the debate varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and from time to time.

I’m not hearing any voice advocating the “return of the rope” in England today, though the history of that country is full of the most terrible forms of punishment ever meted out to offenders.

One such colourful punishment in the Middle Ages was “hanging, drawing and quartering,” a special treatment reserved for the crime of treason against the king: The poor fellow would be hung up till he was at death’s door; brought down; have his bowels and internal organs scooped out and thrown into the fire; have his limbs separated from the body... all the while being alive; then he would be decapitated.

But by the mid 1960s the Brits had done away with the death penalty, one of the guiding thoughts being the “chilling finality” of death, wherein a judicial error had no chance of being redeemed.

Some American states still maintain the penalty while others have abolished it, though even among the abolitionists the matter is not fully laid to rest.

A number of issues have come up, including some botched and grotesque executions during which the condemned man writhed and convulsed, and generally did not die well.

And so the debate rages on. Which is why I want to ask the reader to consider a hypothetical case: A husband wants his wife dead. The motive is for him to inherit his wife’s life insurance to the tune of $20,000 and their house valued at $80,000. His male lover agrees to do the killing.

On the night of the murder, the husband drops the killer at his house; the killer surprises the wife, takes her at knife-point and makes her drive to a remote wood where he bludgeons her with a heavy club and then stabs her several times in the neck and back till she’s cold.

All the while, the husband is sitting in a bar with friends having a cool drink till the killer reports the job has been done, and the husband drives to the wood and joins the killer in setting the car alight to destroy the evidence.

But something goes wrong and both the husband and the killer are arrested on suspicion of murder. Whereupon the killer confesses in an option for a plea bargain, and implicates the husband as the one who ordered the killing; he gets life for his role but the husband gets the death sentence.

The argument is that the boyfriend, who was the actual doer of the deed, was just a weapon in the hands of the husband, and the latter was the actual killer.

Now, would you plead for the husband’s life to be spared on account that during the 18 years he’s spent in prison he has repented and become a good man, and besides he has three children who stand to suffer a terrible double loss, and that the children themselves have pardoned their father for killing their mum?

Pardon me, but I’ve been pulling your leg. All these facts are correct, only it’s the wife, not the husband, who hired her boyfriend to kill her husband. Her name is Kelly Gissendaner, and she was executed on Tuesday, the first Georgian woman executed in 75 years.

Now, are you still an abolitionist?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]