Dr. Abraham Halpern, reknown forensic expert and a would-be abolitionist of the death penalty was to present
"....a motion ...proposing that The Westchester Psychiatric Society call for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States. ...The only other D.B. that has called for the abolition of the death penalty is the Puerto Rico D.B. The APA LIFERS also voted in favor of such a resolution.
I are ready to support Dr. Halpern, the Lifers and the silent majority of APA psychiatrists.
The future (of lack of a future) for Mr. Ayala Lopez is being decided within days Federal Court in Puerto Rico. He has been found guilty of assassinating a federal security agent in 2003 at the San Juan VAMC where I have worked for the last 25 years. The killing of this officer was a big loss for me and his friends of so many years. But I am still personally against the State (or the Nation) using a Hammurabbi code-like stance to deliver justice.
Here are some of the principles for which death penalty should not be an alternative of justice:
It deprives the person of his right to life
It deprives the person the right to dignity
It deprives the person of the possibility to rehabilitation
It deprives society of the possibility of amending an erroneous guilty verdict
It is psychologically similar to a premeditated assassination
It adds psychopathology and suffering to the aggressor’s family
It adds psychopathology and suffering to the victim’s family
It is not self defense of society but premeditated vengeance
It leads to a prolonged sadistic legal process
Is is anti cultural in Puerto Rico
A 1969 resolution of the Board of Trustees of the APA called for the abolition of the death penalty and declared that the best available scientific and expert opinion holds it to be anachronistic, brutalizing, ineffective and contrary to progress in penology and forensic psychiatry'.
Before his retirement in 1994 Judge Harry A Blakcmun spoke in favor of the abolition of the death penalty in the United States. He said that in practice it is capricious, unjust and filled with errors of fact, legal and moral errors.
Many years ago Professor Louis Jolvon West, MD of the University of California, said that capital punishment is out of fashion, is immoral, cruel, brutalizing, unjust, ineffective, and dangerous and that it obstructs justice.
Observations by psychiatrists demonstrate that the death penalty generates illness on account of prisoner torture, perverts the identity of physician that is converted to torturers. It also promotes more assassinations than those that it prevents.
Nestor J Galarza, President
Puerto Rico Psychiatric society
