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Sri Lanka Can’t Get Its Executioner to Hang Around

Sri Lanka’s new hangman, the third to be hired in the past year, resigned in shock after seeing the country’s gallows.
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There is a new job opening in Sri Lanka — but people might want to think twice before they apply. Sri Lanka’s newly hired hangman resigned in shock after seeing the country’s gallows for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

“We gave him one week's training, but he resigned after seeing the gallows, saying that he didn't want the job,” Chandrarathna Pallegama, Sri Lanka’s commissioner general of prisons, told Reuters. Pallegama added that in the future recruits would be shown the gallows before training.

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This is not the first time the Sri Lankan prisons department has had trouble filling this job post. This squeamish recruit is the third to be hired in the past year after the last two men who filled the position stopped showing up to work.

Why exactly is the Sri Lankan gallows so horrifying? While criminals can be sentenced to death, the country hasn't executed anyone since 1976. The executioner’s duties are primarily administrative.

Perhaps it’s the sorry state of the country’s prisons. Although the death penalty hasn't been applied in over 30 years, Sri Lanka currently has 1,200 inmates either on death row or awaiting final judgment on their death sentence, according to the Sri Lankan news site Colombo Page. A group of death row inmates mounted a protest on the roof of the country’s Bogambara prison in January, demanding that they be killed per their sentence or released.

Polly Truscott, Amnesty International's deputy Asia-Pacific director, told VICE News that several recent incidents of violence in Sri Lankan prisons were apparently triggered by inmates protesting poor conditions. “We've seen both riots and alleged attacks on prisoners by guards over the last few months,” she said. “Sri Lankan prisons are severely overcrowded, to a large extent because many prisoners are held for lengthy periods without trial, which is contrary to international law.”

Politicians have criticized this legal purgatory as well, although some have argued that the death penalty’s implementation would resolve the issue.

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“The death penalty is the ultimate cruel and inhuman form of punishment, and Sri Lanka should move to abolish it immediately,” Truscott said.

Widespread brutality in Sri Lanka’s jails has made the killing of inmates fairly routine. One of the most notorious episodes occurred at a high-security jail in Colombo in 2012, in which a riot left 27 prisoners dead. Critics of the government charged that security forces had massacred the inmates.

Sri Lanka has seen a marked increase in violent crime over the past several years, as the country continues to grapple with the legacy of its brutal 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009. The conflict centered on a separatist movement by the ethnic Tamil group — the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — that sought to create a separate Tamil state in the east. However, the BBC notes that there are no Tamil Tiger combatants or suspects presently on death row.

Follow Olivia Becker on Twitter: @obecker928

Photo via Flickr