I was working as the Resident
Surgeon at GH Kandy in the late1970’s. The work involved doing casualty
surgery on two days a week, doing the OPD Surgical clinic and covering
up for Surgeons on leave. It was a hectic time. Casualty day surgery
would start at 2pm and would go on till about 11pm. 11 pm to 6am was
sleeping time. After a post-casualty round at 8am next day, the post
casualty surgery would go on till about 1.30am. If there were any acute
emergencies at night, I would be called to deal with it. Massive
bleeding, a perforated abdominal viscus, gangrene of bowel were all such
acute indications for surgery, to name a few.
On this particular day the casualty surgery which started at 2 pm went on till just after 11pm. It had been a hectic day. I went to my Resident Surgeons’ quarters, situated in Hantanne just above the General Hospital Kandy. I had a hurried late dinner and ‘hit the sack’. I was woken up by the incessant ring of the telephone. I looked at the clock it was 2am. It was the surgical intern house officer on the telephone. He told me that they had a surgical emergency. A prisoner from the adjoining Bogambara Prison, had a neck wound, which was bleeding profusely. I told him to apply pressure on the bleeding site and take the patient straight away to the operating theatre. He told me that the patient was already outside the Operating Theatre ‘D’, the allocated casualty operating theatre and a pressure dressing was in place. I told him to get some blood cross-matched urgently. I got ready and went quickly to the Operating Theatre D, where the patient was.
I saw a crowd of prison guards’ outside the operating theatre. My friend Dr.Panagamuwa, the then Medical Officer Prisons, was with the patient and told me the story. This patient, a condemned prisoner on the night before his expected execution, had been offered his last dinner, on an aluminium plate. He was under intermittent observation in his lonely cell, by the prison guard assigned to watch him. At some time in the lonely night, he had ripped the aluminium plate and with its sharp edge, had cut his own neck. The prison guards found him bleeding on the floor. They had summoned the prison Medical Officer, Dr.Panagamuwa. The doctor had found a bleeding neck wound and a partially cut trachea. He had promptly passed an endo-tracheal tube into his wind pipe and put pressure on the wound in the neck and rushed him to the GH Kandy. I took him into the operating theatre and under general anaesthesia patched him up. I had to do a tracheostomy, a temporary hole in his wind pipe, to ease his breathing. We had to tie up the bleeding blood vessels, in the area of the cut. We had to give him two pints of blood as transfusion to replace the blood he had lost already. Luckily no major blood vessels had been damaged. I sent him back to the ward and went back to my quarters to resume my interrupted sleep, at about 4 am. One hour later at 5 am the telephone rang. When I answered it, there was a profusely apologetic person, at the other end of the telephone line. He identified himself as Mr.Delgoda, the Commisioner of Prisons, speaking from Colombo. He said that he wanted to ask me a question, regarding the prisoner whom I had operated on, a few hours back. I said ‘Please go ahead’. He asked me “IS THE PRISONER FIT TO BE HUNG, AT 8AM TO-DAY?” It took me awhile to answer the question put to me. I could vaguely recall a statement in our Forensic Surgery lectures, where it was said, that a condemned prisoner had to be certified by a medical officer, that he had the ability to walk to the gallows, on his own steam. I then confidently answered, that the prisoner “WAS NOT FIT TO BE HUNG”. The Commissioner thanked me and said that he needed this answer, to get special permission from the then Governor-General, Mr.William Gopallawa to get a stay of execution and its postponement to another day. I abandoned my efforts to get any more sleep and got ready to go for the post-casualty rounds at 8am.
The patient who was very withdrawn in the ward had a lot of visitors to see him. He made a good recovery and we transferred him back to the Prison Hospital. I had forgotten all about this patient, when I went on relief duty to the Batticaloa Hospital, as Resident Surgeon, a few months later, where I had adventures with a cyclone blowing over the place. I was made Consultant Surgeon there subsequently. One day long after we had overcome the effects of the cyclone, a Prison Officer met me. He identified himself as Mr. Phillips, the Superintendant of Prisons, Batticaloa. He then asked me “Doctor, do you remember me? I was the person who brought that condemned man to you, for surgery at Kandy.” I was intrigued and asked him, ‘What happened to that patient?” He said “That prisoner got a pardon on a day of general amnesty, granted by the Governor-General. He is out of prison now and is living with his family”
That is not the end of the story. Long afterwards I happened to give a lift to a patient of mine in Colombo, when I was working as the Consultant Surgeon at the NHSL, Colombo. When I found out that he was a prison officer, I told him the above story. He remarked “Doctor you should have certified him as fit to be hung. All these condemned prisoners are like that. They like to die any other way, than on the gallows. They consider a death on the gallows a very shameful way of dying”. Well that was another point of view. I kept my own counsel and did not comment on his remark.
Long years later, I read in a prison newspaper, the subsequent fate of this prisoner. After the Presidential pardon and release from prison he was settled at the controversial Kent Farm off Vavuniya. The Tamil insurgents had mounted an attack on this camp and the rehabilitated prisoner had died in the fighting.
At last he had found his release from this mortal coil.
Golden Oldie
On this particular day the casualty surgery which started at 2 pm went on till just after 11pm. It had been a hectic day. I went to my Resident Surgeons’ quarters, situated in Hantanne just above the General Hospital Kandy. I had a hurried late dinner and ‘hit the sack’. I was woken up by the incessant ring of the telephone. I looked at the clock it was 2am. It was the surgical intern house officer on the telephone. He told me that they had a surgical emergency. A prisoner from the adjoining Bogambara Prison, had a neck wound, which was bleeding profusely. I told him to apply pressure on the bleeding site and take the patient straight away to the operating theatre. He told me that the patient was already outside the Operating Theatre ‘D’, the allocated casualty operating theatre and a pressure dressing was in place. I told him to get some blood cross-matched urgently. I got ready and went quickly to the Operating Theatre D, where the patient was.
I saw a crowd of prison guards’ outside the operating theatre. My friend Dr.Panagamuwa, the then Medical Officer Prisons, was with the patient and told me the story. This patient, a condemned prisoner on the night before his expected execution, had been offered his last dinner, on an aluminium plate. He was under intermittent observation in his lonely cell, by the prison guard assigned to watch him. At some time in the lonely night, he had ripped the aluminium plate and with its sharp edge, had cut his own neck. The prison guards found him bleeding on the floor. They had summoned the prison Medical Officer, Dr.Panagamuwa. The doctor had found a bleeding neck wound and a partially cut trachea. He had promptly passed an endo-tracheal tube into his wind pipe and put pressure on the wound in the neck and rushed him to the GH Kandy. I took him into the operating theatre and under general anaesthesia patched him up. I had to do a tracheostomy, a temporary hole in his wind pipe, to ease his breathing. We had to tie up the bleeding blood vessels, in the area of the cut. We had to give him two pints of blood as transfusion to replace the blood he had lost already. Luckily no major blood vessels had been damaged. I sent him back to the ward and went back to my quarters to resume my interrupted sleep, at about 4 am. One hour later at 5 am the telephone rang. When I answered it, there was a profusely apologetic person, at the other end of the telephone line. He identified himself as Mr.Delgoda, the Commisioner of Prisons, speaking from Colombo. He said that he wanted to ask me a question, regarding the prisoner whom I had operated on, a few hours back. I said ‘Please go ahead’. He asked me “IS THE PRISONER FIT TO BE HUNG, AT 8AM TO-DAY?” It took me awhile to answer the question put to me. I could vaguely recall a statement in our Forensic Surgery lectures, where it was said, that a condemned prisoner had to be certified by a medical officer, that he had the ability to walk to the gallows, on his own steam. I then confidently answered, that the prisoner “WAS NOT FIT TO BE HUNG”. The Commissioner thanked me and said that he needed this answer, to get special permission from the then Governor-General, Mr.William Gopallawa to get a stay of execution and its postponement to another day. I abandoned my efforts to get any more sleep and got ready to go for the post-casualty rounds at 8am.
The patient who was very withdrawn in the ward had a lot of visitors to see him. He made a good recovery and we transferred him back to the Prison Hospital. I had forgotten all about this patient, when I went on relief duty to the Batticaloa Hospital, as Resident Surgeon, a few months later, where I had adventures with a cyclone blowing over the place. I was made Consultant Surgeon there subsequently. One day long after we had overcome the effects of the cyclone, a Prison Officer met me. He identified himself as Mr. Phillips, the Superintendant of Prisons, Batticaloa. He then asked me “Doctor, do you remember me? I was the person who brought that condemned man to you, for surgery at Kandy.” I was intrigued and asked him, ‘What happened to that patient?” He said “That prisoner got a pardon on a day of general amnesty, granted by the Governor-General. He is out of prison now and is living with his family”
That is not the end of the story. Long afterwards I happened to give a lift to a patient of mine in Colombo, when I was working as the Consultant Surgeon at the NHSL, Colombo. When I found out that he was a prison officer, I told him the above story. He remarked “Doctor you should have certified him as fit to be hung. All these condemned prisoners are like that. They like to die any other way, than on the gallows. They consider a death on the gallows a very shameful way of dying”. Well that was another point of view. I kept my own counsel and did not comment on his remark.
Long years later, I read in a prison newspaper, the subsequent fate of this prisoner. After the Presidential pardon and release from prison he was settled at the controversial Kent Farm off Vavuniya. The Tamil insurgents had mounted an attack on this camp and the rehabilitated prisoner had died in the fighting.
At last he had found his release from this mortal coil.
Victor Gnanadurai Hi Philip, the late Victor Benjamin related a similar story: A surgeon’s 1976 experience with a death row prisoner
by Dr. Victor Ariyaratnam Benjamin
The re-introduction of capital punishment in Sri Lanka last year, after the murder of Colombo’s High Court judge and his police bodyguard, prompts me to share a 1976 experience with readers.
I was a surgeon at Kandy in Sri Lanka. One night, at about 10 o’clock, I was called to attend to a severely injured man. He was a model prisoner whom the prison staff liked. He was due to be executed early the next morning for murder. His last wish was that he be given a bottle of gin to go with his last meal. His request was allowed and he was permitted to consume the meal as late as he wished. After he enjoyed his meal and gin, the prisoner was ready to die. He decided to take his own life rather than wait to be hanged at the gallows a few hours later.
So he broke the empty bottle of gin by hitting it on the floor. Then he vigorously stabbed himself repeatedly and forcibly over his abdomen, causing multiple, deep, penetrating cuts through his anterior abdominal wall that resulted in several perforations of his stomach and intestines and multiple lacerations of his mesentery, liver and omentum. In the next few hours I carefully repaired all his abdominal injuries.
Next morning, after receiving orders from the Ministry of Justice in Colombo, the prison authorities wanted a medical certificate from me that this patient was "medically fit for execution". I asked the prison authorities what exactly was the level of fitness required for a prisoner to be killed.
I then spoke to the prisoner who was a hospital inpatient in my surgical ward. He told me he had been ready to die, and blamed me for having prevented his death a few hours earlier.
He told me he did not deserve to die by execution, but was reconciled to dying because he had killed another man. He had returned home one day to find the other man at his home, having an affair with his wife. He lost control of himself and attacked the other man, who died as a result. But he said he had never intended to kill the man or cause death to anyone. He said he was convicted for murder on fabricated evidence.
My decision was simple. I issued a written medical certificate that the prisoner was unfit for removal from hospital. Removal from hospital would be at peril to the life of the prisoner. I told the prison authorities if the prisoner died on the way to the prison gallows, which were a short distance, the prison authorities would have been responsible for causing his death before execution.
As a result no one was willing to remove the prisoner from hospital. The prison authorities were unwilling to take that risk. Consequently, the execution was not carried out that day.
I kept this prisoner in my hospital ward for two weeks, by which time he was my friend. In the meantime his lawyers appealed to the president and their client’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He would have been released from prison about 10 years later and, I hope, is alive in a Sinhala village somewhere in Sri Lanka now.
Dr. Ariyaratnam Benjamin is a GP in Goodooga, NSW.
by Dr. Victor Ariyaratnam Benjamin
The re-introduction of capital punishment in Sri Lanka last year, after the murder of Colombo’s High Court judge and his police bodyguard, prompts me to share a 1976 experience with readers.
I was a surgeon at Kandy in Sri Lanka. One night, at about 10 o’clock, I was called to attend to a severely injured man. He was a model prisoner whom the prison staff liked. He was due to be executed early the next morning for murder. His last wish was that he be given a bottle of gin to go with his last meal. His request was allowed and he was permitted to consume the meal as late as he wished. After he enjoyed his meal and gin, the prisoner was ready to die. He decided to take his own life rather than wait to be hanged at the gallows a few hours later.
So he broke the empty bottle of gin by hitting it on the floor. Then he vigorously stabbed himself repeatedly and forcibly over his abdomen, causing multiple, deep, penetrating cuts through his anterior abdominal wall that resulted in several perforations of his stomach and intestines and multiple lacerations of his mesentery, liver and omentum. In the next few hours I carefully repaired all his abdominal injuries.
Next morning, after receiving orders from the Ministry of Justice in Colombo, the prison authorities wanted a medical certificate from me that this patient was "medically fit for execution". I asked the prison authorities what exactly was the level of fitness required for a prisoner to be killed.
I then spoke to the prisoner who was a hospital inpatient in my surgical ward. He told me he had been ready to die, and blamed me for having prevented his death a few hours earlier.
He told me he did not deserve to die by execution, but was reconciled to dying because he had killed another man. He had returned home one day to find the other man at his home, having an affair with his wife. He lost control of himself and attacked the other man, who died as a result. But he said he had never intended to kill the man or cause death to anyone. He said he was convicted for murder on fabricated evidence.
My decision was simple. I issued a written medical certificate that the prisoner was unfit for removal from hospital. Removal from hospital would be at peril to the life of the prisoner. I told the prison authorities if the prisoner died on the way to the prison gallows, which were a short distance, the prison authorities would have been responsible for causing his death before execution.
As a result no one was willing to remove the prisoner from hospital. The prison authorities were unwilling to take that risk. Consequently, the execution was not carried out that day.
I kept this prisoner in my hospital ward for two weeks, by which time he was my friend. In the meantime his lawyers appealed to the president and their client’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He would have been released from prison about 10 years later and, I hope, is alive in a Sinhala village somewhere in Sri Lanka now.
Dr. Ariyaratnam Benjamin is a GP in Goodooga, NSW.
Golden Oldie
Amazing Grace
https://youtu.be/p5NCyuRhoGY
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