Any nation that engages in the blatant human rights violation that is capital punishment inherently fails the litmus test for a civilized society. The latest iteration of Israel’s proposed death penalty bill for convicted terrorists is no exception. On the contrary, it only provides further evidence of how quickly any procedural safeguards and notions of humanitarian practices evaporate once a civilization opens itself to the veritable danse macabre of state-sponsored killing. Attorney Robert Dunham, Director of the Death Penalty Policy Project and former Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, encapsulated it best when he wrote that the current bill “is a walking human rights violation—including denial of meaningful access to counsel, non-unanimous sentencing votes in military trials, no possibility of reversing or commuting a sentence, etc.”

The most recent version of the Knesset’s proposed death penalty bill, which far-right MK Limor Son Har-Melech of Otzma Yehudit initiated, would require the Israel Prison Service commissioner to designate a prison officer to hang those condemned to death.  While the bill stipulates that the prison warden, a judicial representative, an official auditor, and a representative of the inmate’s family must be present, it allows the sentence to proceed even if some of these parties are absent, to prevent........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)