The pros and cons of the death penalty

The number of executions is rising around the world, even as many countries move towards abolishing or limiting the use of capital punishment.

According to the latest figures from Amnesty International – compiled from official statistics, media reports and information passed on from individuals sentenced to death – there were 883 executions worldwide in 2022. This total excludes China, which does not release details of those killed by the state but is believed to execute thousands of people a year. The global figure is up 53% from 2021 and is the highest number since 2017.

Amnesty said that at the end of 2022 there were more than 28,000 people under sentence of death in 52 countries.

In the past half century capital punishment has increasingly been viewed as a human-rights issue. More than 120 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, according to The Death Penalty Project. Now, executions are most commonly carried out in China, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia (although there is little reliable data for countries such as Afghanistan, North Korea and Syria).

Pro: public support

Although use of the death penalty is gradually declining in the US, a 2021 survey by Gallup found a majority of Americans (54%) said they were "in favour of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder".

In France, which abolished death by guillotine only in 1981, presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen has vowed to hold a referendum on restoring capital punishment, which is backed by a huge majority of her supporters.

A YouGov poll in 2022 found 40% of Britons were still in favour of the death penalty, with Conservative voters far more likely to support it (58%), and those aged over 65 more than twice as likely as those aged 18-24.

Con: wrongful execution risk

One of the most "compelling forces" driving worldwide opinions against the death penalty has been "the increasing recognition of the potential for error in its use", wrote criminology professor Carolyn Hoyle and Saul Lehrfreund, co-director of the London-based NGO The Death Penalty Project, in a blog for the University of Oxford’s Death Penalty Research Unit. With justice systems prone to error, bias and coercion, wrongful executions are, in fact, "inevitable".

Since 1993, Washington-based non-profit organisation The Death Penalty Information Center has been tracking wrongful executions in the US, going back to the Supreme Court ruling in 1972. In a 2021 report, "The Innocence Epidemic", it concluded that at least 185 people had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death since 1972. Nearly 70% of those cases involved "official misconduct by police, prosecutors or other government officials" – more so in cases involving a defendant of colour.

"The death penalty has always been, and continues to be, disproportionately wielded against black people and other people of colour," explained the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, regarding the US. As of 2019, "black and Hispanic people represent 31% of the US population, but 53% of death-row inmates".

Pro: could reduce crime

The "commonest justification" for the death penalty is that it functions as a "unique deterrent" for others, wrote Lehrfreund.

"Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed," Lee Anderson, the former Tory party deputy chairman, told The Spectator last year, backing calls to bring back the death penalty in Britain. A subsequent poll by Omnisis found 43% of British respondents agreed capital punishment would be an effective deterrent.

"When the UK first suspended the death penalty in 1965, many hoped that removing violence from the top end of justice would trickle down through society, making us more civilised," wrote Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. "Instead, crime went up, and today, as predators exploit our liberality, a state without the death penalty resembles a lion tamer without a whip."

Con: not a deterrent

The death penalty has "no deterrent effect", said the American Civil Liberties Union. "Claims that each execution deters a certain number of murders have been thoroughly discredited by social science research."

Most murders are committed either in the heat of passion, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or because of mental illness. The few murderers who plan their crimes "intend and expect to avoid punishment altogether by not getting caught".

The Death Penalty Project concluded after a review of multiple studies that capital punishment "does not deter murder to a marginally greater extent than does the threat or application of life imprisonment". In 2021, the Human Rights Council cited studies which showed that some member states that had abolished the death penalty saw their murder rates stay the same, or even decline.

Pro: sense of retribution

Of the "four major justifications for punishment" – deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation and retribution – it is the last of these that has "often been scorned by academics and judges", said Robert Blecker, a professor emeritus at New York Law School, in The New York Times. But "ultimately, it provides capital punishment with its only truly moral foundation".

Supporters often point to religious justification based on the Bible, citing "an eye for an eye". But retribution is "not simply revenge", said Blecker. "Revenge may be limitless and misdirected at the undeserving, as with collective punishment. Retribution, on the other hand, can help restore a moral balance. It demands that punishment must be limited and proportional."

Con: extremely expensive

Many supporters of the death penalty argue that it is more cost-effective than feeding and housing an inmate for the whole of a life-without-parole sentence. But in countries with arduous appeals processes and strong human-rights organisations, the death penalty is – counterintuitively – far more expensive than imprisonment for life.

More than a dozen US states found in 2007 that death penalty cases were up to 10 times more expensive than comparable non-death penalty cases. That year, New Jersey became the first state to ban executions for reasons of "time and money", said NBC News.