History
The death penalty, and popular opposition to it, has a long history in Sri Lanka. The British introduced the death penalty after they took control of the island in 1815 for murder, and "waging war against the King." After independence, the then Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike abolished capital punishment in 1956. However, it was rapidly reintroduced after his assassination in 1959. Opposition to the death penalty started becoming increasingly widespread and the United National Party government modified the use of the capital punishment in its 1978 rewrite of the constitution. Under the new arrangement, death sentences could only be carried out if authorised by the trial judge, the attorney general and the minister of justice. If there was no agreement, the sentence was to be commuted to life imprisonment. The sentence was also to be ratified by the President. This clause effectively ended executions. The last execution in Sri Lanka took place in 1976.
Read more about this topic: Capital Punishment In Sri Lanka
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“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)