The pros and cons of the death penalty

There was a sharp rise in the number of known executions carried out around the world in 2023 – a 31% increase on the previous year and the most since 2015.

Amnesty International compiles the figures from official statistics, media reports and information passed on from individuals sentenced to death. And according to its latest data, there were 1,153 executions in 2023, excluding China, which does not release details of those killed by the state but is believed to execute thousands of people a year.

Amnesty said there was a 20% increase in the number of death sentences handed out globally in 2023, taking the total to 2,428.

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In the past half-century capital punishment has increasingly been viewed as a human-rights issue. Today, 112 countries are fully abolitionist and 144 have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. Amnesty recorded executions taking place in just 16 countries last year, with the majority carried out in China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the last of which saw a near 50% year-on-year rise in the number of people put to death by the state.

Pro: public support

Although use of the death penalty is gradually declining in the US, a 2023 survey by Gallup found a majority of Americans (53%) remain "in favour of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder". That figure is "a five-decade low", said Gallup.

In France, which abolished death by guillotine only in 1981, public support for reintroducing the death penalty is split evenly, according to Statista. Presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen has in the past vowed to hold a referendum on restoring capital punishment, which is backed by a huge majority of her supporters.

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

Con: wrongful execution risk

One of the most "compelling forces" driving worldwide opinion 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. It has concluded that at least 200 people had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death since 1972, a majority of these cases involving "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," said the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, regarding the US.

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 and current Reform UK MP, said 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

"Study after study shows that the death penalty does not deter crime," said Scientific American.

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", said the American Civil Liberties Union, and "claims that each execution deters a certain number of murders have been thoroughly discredited by social science research".

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.

The Cato Institute think tank concluded that in the US, each death penalty inmate costs more than a million dollars more than a general population inmate. In 2007, New Jersey became the first state to ban executions for reasons of "time and money", said NBC News.