"The death penalty, as a mode of punishment, is contrary...

"The death penalty, as a mode of punishment, is contrary to the contemporary human rights standards and values and, thus, its continued application in Nigeria would downgrade the status of the country among the comity of democratic nation-states that have expunged the barbaric law from their legal books," wrote Okechukwu Emeh in an editorial published in the Vanguard. "Given all this, the penalty should be seen as a human rights scandal, as well as an affront to human dignity and respectability. It is heavy-handed, gruesome, bizarre, retributive, vengeful, degrading and against human decency. Capital punishment gives judges and juries excessive discretion to decree life or death and they impose it so erratically that the result is cruel, unusual and degrading punishment."