Activate the Death Penalty

Today we will be burying our colleague Ibrahim Foday who was brutally murdered at Grafton.
While we stand the risk of prejudicing the investigations, yet we think that there is a growing trend of irresponsible behaviour which must be checked before the situation gets more desperate than it is now.
Since 23 military officers were shot dead in October of 1998 a number of murders have been committed which have in our view gone unpunished.
There was the brutal or rather professional murder of the Foulah businessman who was killed with a single bullet to his head at almost point blank range. There is the murder at Kingtom of the British national along with the murder of Ken Moore and others. Infact there is the alleged murder now of a business woman in the Northern part of the country which case is yet to be charged to court.
In all of these incidents the murderers have either been committed to jail sentences or freed as in the case of Ken Moore.
Some of these men like those involved in the murder of the Foulah businessman have even gone on to break jail and escape.
The point here is that these murderers no longer fear any jail term, and they even boast that they will kill and go to jail. Incidentally it seems it is this same mentality which apparently propelled those men at Grafton to carry out the brutal murder of Ibrahim Foday.
It is for this reason that we call for the death penalty to be activated so that it will serve as a check to this reckless behaviour.
Amnesty International can have their say by advocating for punishment in place of death. However when punishment alone does not provide the required deterrent then we believe that the death penalty must be used to serve as a check if not to entirely stop the spate of reckless murders but at least to reduce the incidences or frequency with which they take place.
Today it is Ibrahim Foday and we journalists are standing up for him, but what happens tomorrow if it is someone else who is an ordinary citizen without the clout of Ibrahim Foday. This is why we believe we must start to fight the impunity with which these acts are committed and attempt to put a stop to them, and the only way this can be done now is to re-activate the death penalty with an example.