Written Analysis – ELC 501

Death Penalty: Is It Necessary?

Do you support the death penalty? If this question were ever asked, you would realize that
many of those who advocate for the death penalty do so in the name of the victims. The
argument perhaps being that the victims of violent crime and their loved ones have a right to
see the life of the perpetrator taken by the state and that the death penalty is a fair, just and
most effective means of not only dealing with such perpetrators but of also deterring future
crime.
Contrary to popular opinion, evidence from around the world has shown that the death
penalty has no unique deterrent effect on crime. A study done in Canada in 2003, 27 years
after the country abolished the death penalty, showed that the murder rate had fallen by 44
percent since 1975 when the capital punishment was still enforced. Thus, far from making
society safer, the death penalty has been shown to have a brutalizing effect on society,
serving only to endorse the use of force and to continue the cycle of violence.

Furthermore, statistics have shown that a large and growing number of victims’ families
worldwide actually reject the death penalty and are speaking out against it, saying it doesn’t
bring back or honor their murdered family member, does not heal the pain of the murder, and
violates their ethical and religious beliefs.

A common excuse is that a majority of the public support it. This notwithstanding the fact
that history is littered with human rights violations that were supported by the majority but
are nowadays looked upon with horror. Slavery and racial discrimination for example had
widespread support in the societies in which they occurred but still constituted gross
violations of the victims’ human rights.

Fortunately though, public opinion is malleable and heavily influenced by the amount and
type of information that the public has at their disposal concerning a given subject and after
over 30 years of research on the death penalty, Amnesty International believes that public
support for capital punishment is overwhelmingly based on a desire to be free from crime and
the belief that the death penalty will help achieve this.

Political leaders therefore, as part of their responsibility to act within the boundaries of
human rights, need to present effective means of addressing the situation that neither
endorses further violence, continues the cycle of violence nor creates more misery through
violence. As such when the public requests solutions to violent crime, the answer must never
be further killing. J. Van Rooyen once said, “the death penalty is a very convenient political
alternative to real, effective and difficult public protection and crime prevention programmes.
It is a cheap way for politically inclined people to pretend to their fearful constituencies that
something is being done to combat crime.”

So what alternatives are there to creating a safe crime free environment without the use of the
death penalty? To borrow from the words of Nelson Mandela when responding to public
demands for the reintroduction of the death penalty in South Africa, “It is not because the
death sentence has been scrapped that crime has reached such unacceptable levels. Even if
the death sentence is brought back, crime itself will remain as it is. What is required here is
that the security forces must do their work and we are busy to ensure that the security
forces have the capacity to deliver services, safety to the community. That is the issue, not
the death sentence”. The alternative then? The government ensuring that security forces
have the requisite capacity to deliver services and the security forces doing their work of
keeping all of us safe. In the words of Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, “Taking life when a
life has been lost is revenge, not justice.”

https://www.amnestykenya.org/death-penalty-necessary/