By Omar Bah
In a statement shared with The Standard yesterday, Professor Ba Samba Njol Drammeh, a Gambian based in Atlanta, said the country should not return to enforcing capital punishment in response to rising public concern over murder cases.
He argued that the death penalty has failed to prove itself as an effective deterrent and warned that wrongful convictions remain a serious risk in any justice system.
Drammeh said he would only support capital punishment if The Gambia were governed under Sharia law as an Islamic republic.
Under the current constitutional and legal framework, however, he said life imprisonment is the appropriate sentence for murder and other grave crimes.
He dismissed the argument that executions reduce violent crime, pointing to the United States, where capital punishment remains in force in some states but murder continues. He said the existence of the death penalty does not automatically translate into public safety, justice or crime reduction.
The professor also raised a strong fairness argument, saying the justice system is not equally accessible to all suspects. Wealthier defendants can afford stronger legal representation, he said, while poorer accused persons often depend on weaker defence. That imbalance, he warned, increases the risk of convicting and executing innocent people on the basis of flawed testimony or judicial error.
“For that reason, I do not support the death penalty. I prefer life imprisonment because an innocent person could be executed for a crime they did not commit,” he said.
Drammeh further recalled the executions carried out under former President Yahya Jammeh, including the killing of nine people during the Ramadan period, and said those executions did not bring down crime. Instead, he argued, they deepened fear without delivering lasting deterrence.
His comments come amid renewed public debate in The Gambia over whether the state should revive capital punishment as a response to violent crime. Supporters of reinstatement argue that rising murder cases demand harsher penalties, while opponents insist the focus should be on investigation, prosecution quality, prison reform and certainty of punishment rather than the return of state executions.
