Who will train new hangmen?
Both positions for executioner fell vacant several months ago. One of the previous hangmen retired after serving nearly two decades (he died recently) whilst the other was promoted as prison guard. Ironically, neither of them hung anybody during their tenure; they were both hired after President J.R. Jayawardene suspended capital punishment in 1977. The last hanging took place in 1976.
Training the new recruits, therefore, poses a challenge. There is nobody alive that has executed a man at the gallows. And out of everyone employed at the Prisons Department today, only Commissioner Hapuarachchi has ever witnessed a hanging.
“I was head of the death row section as jailor,” he said. “There were three jailors on duty. I’m currently the only person in the department who has seen the executions. We are not sure who will train the new people but there is nobody except me.”
Many candidates had thought they would only have to “pull a lever,” said Kodippili. But it is more complicated than that. “Both executioners take part in the process of hanging a criminal,” explained Hapuarachchi. “You have to hold him, place a belt around his body securing his arms, take him to the gallows, tie the legs, and put the hood over his face and the rope around his neck. The other executioner will release the lever.”
Everything has to be done within a space of eight minutes. “You must be very, very quick,” Hapuarachchi elaborated. “This is because you are dealing with a human being and you don’t know what will happen to his emotions.”
The question remains, though, whether the new hangmen will ever have to use their skills. While successive governments have regularly threatened to revive capital punishment, no president has officially sanctioned it. Indeed, it has been used more in the form of “psychological control” or a “psychological tool”.
Every time the country witnesses a particularly serious wave of crime-usually climaxing in one or two acts of dastardly inhuman behaviour-the government summons up the topic of capital punishment. The gallows are cleaned out, the rope tested and the media is replete with discourse. This time, they went so far as to recruit a couple of executioners.
“As far as we are concerned, we had to fill the vacancies,” Kodippili said. “The capital punishment provision in Sri Lankan law has not been repealed. One day, if the government decides to activate the provision, we are bound to implement it. We have to be ready. That is our responsibility.”
That could mean a lot of “hanging around” for the hangmen-although Kodippili says it need not be so. An executioner is below the rank of jail guard. Perhaps, he said, they could support the management with administrative work.
