In an unprecedented failure of Tennessee’s state apparatus, the execution of Christa Pike, a 50-year-old woman sentenced to death for a crime she committed at 18, went awry on Wednesday, September 30. Although two lethal injections were administered, Pike survived the doses of pentobarbital and was taken by ambulance from the prison to a nearby hospital shortly afterward. The case has caused an uproar in the United States, and it has also reignited public debate in Greece over capital punishment.
Greece has not executed anyone in more than half a century. Its last execution took place on August 25, 1972, at the old “Dyo Aorakia” firing range in Heraklion, Crete. The last man to face the firing squad was 27-year-old Vasilis Lymperis, who had murdered his wife, their two very young children, and his mother-in-law. From then on, the death penalty effectively fell out of use. Seven years earlier, Aikaterini Dimitrea, who had been sentenced to death four times, was executed by firing squad at Goudi on April 10, 1965. She was the last woman to be executed in Greece.
It was formally abolished by law under the government of Andreas Papandreou in 1993. In practice, however, it had already been abandoned under Constantine Karamanlis, who took the helm of the country on July 24, 1974. The issue landed on his desk almost immediately, because two men convicted of horrific crimes were awaiting execution. Nikos Koemtzis had committed three murders. Ilias Soulis had killed a police officer, a father of two young children, after having an affair with the officer’s wife.
Karamanlis had already decided to end capital punishment, and both men’s sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Soulis and Koemtzis escaped the firing squad quite literally at the last minute.
In 1998, Greece ratified Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights, concerning the abolition of the death penalty, through Law. Article 1 of the Protocol states that the death penalty is abolished and that no one may be sentenced to it or executed. Article 2, however, allows a state to provide for the death penalty for acts committed in time of war or under the imminent threat of war. Greece closed that exception in 2004, when it ratified Protocol No. 13, which abolishes the death penalty in all circumstances.
Speaking to tovima.com, the prominent jurist Theodoros Psychogios ruled out a return of the death penalty in Greece. “In my opinion, the death penalty will not come back, nor should it, not even for the most brutal crimes,” he said.
He stressed, however, that when someone is convicted of a brutal crime, a life sentence must actually be served. At the very least, he said, the time spent behind bars should be substantial. “The purpose of a sentence should be to remove a dangerous offender from society, something that has in essence been suspended by the Paraskevopoulos law of 2015,” he noted. He was referring to the early-release legislation designed to relieve Greece’s badly overcrowded prisons. It is named after Nikos Paraskevopoulos, a criminal law professor who served as Justice Minister in the first SYRIZA government.
According to Psychogios, the Greek legal system today allows inmates to have their sentences reduced and be released after serving only two-fifths of their term. “If someone serves their sentence in an agricultural prison, one day counts as two, and the sentence is also reduced when the inmate works,” he said.
What is needed, he argued, is “a substitute for the death penalty in our legal system, and for it to be enforced.” He added, “This view may sound a little harsh, but we have to be realistic.”
Psychogios pointed to England in the 1960s and ’70s, when sentences were made more lenient. The surge in crime that followed, largely as a result of those reductions, forced the authorities to bring back tougher penalties, he said.
Comparing the Greek and Anglo-Saxon legal systems, he argued that sentences must not only be served in full, but that serious crimes should not be subject to a statute of limitations. “Today in Greece, if someone manages to evade arrest for 20 years for a crime they committed, it becomes time-barred,” he said. Under the Anglo-Saxon system, he added, such crimes never expire.
He cited a case in the United States in which a suspect was arrested 41 years after committing a crime, once advances in technology helped the authorities identify him. “In Greece, that crime would have been time-barred,” he concluded.
