Last year saw a “sharp hike” in the number of executions carried out around the world, according to UN Human Rights, despite the overall global trend continuing to move towards universal abolition.
In Iran, at least 1,500 individuals were reportedly executed in 2025, almost half related to drug offences. It was a similar story in Saudi Arabia, with a total of at least 356 executions, surpassing its record for the number carried out for a second year in a row. According to UK-based campaign group Reprieve, around two thirds were linked to non-lethal drug-related offences. More than half of these were foreign nationals “who appear to have been put to death as part of a ‘war on drugs’ in the kingdom”, reported the BBC.
Article continues belowThe Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Pro: public support
The latest major survey in the US by Gallup found that while the death penalty enjoys less support among younger generations, a majority of Americans (52%) are still “in favour of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder”.
Support in the UK, which had been in slow decline since hangings were abolished in the 1960s, is also on the rise. A YouGov poll last November found more Britons support reintroducing capital punishment (50%) than oppose it (45%), with 42% of the public believing capital punishment should be the standard sentence when it comes to murder.
Support was highest among Reform voters (82%) and Conservatives (67%), with 35% of Labour voters, 30% of Lib Dems and 26% of Greens backing the return of capital punishment. In response, MP Rupert Lowe called for a “legally binding referendum” to decide if there are circumstances “where the guilt is so undeniable, crime is so monstrous, the evil so irredeemable” that capital punishment should be an option.
Con: wrongful execution risk
“The death penalty carries the inherent risk of executing an innocent person,” said the Death Penalty Information Center. It found that since 1973, at least 202 people who were on death row in the US have been exonerated. “The remaining question is how many innocent lives are worth sacrificing to preserve this punishment.”
Statistically this means that “for every 10 people on death row who are executed, at least one person on death row is innocent”, said Dr Bharat Malkani at the University of Birmingham. It could be argued that exonerations “prove that the appeals system is working”, but in reality, it is “more than likely that innocent people have been executed in recent years”.
Often, “people from the margins of society, particularly people of colour”, are those who “disproportionately face execution” due to “racial bias, inadequate legal defence, incentivised informants and unreliable evidence”, said The Innocence Project, regarding cases in the US. These factors “consistently pervert justice at the expense of innocent lives”.
Pro: could reduce crime
“Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed,” Reform UK MP Lee Anderson said in 2023, as he called for the return of the death penalty in Britain.
There is little evidence to support the idea that the death penalty reduces crime, but “fearmongering” remains a “potent political weapon”, particularly for Republican politicians in the US, said Duncan Hosie in The Washington Post. “Over-the-top fealty to the death penalty still resonates with some voters. And as long as it does, opportunistic politicians will exploit these impulses to gain power.”
In September, Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing the full enforcement of capital punishment laws in Washington to “deter and punish the most heinous crimes in our nation’s capital”. He previously said the death penalty for murder would act as a “very strong preventative”.
Con: not a deterrent
“Study after study shows that the death penalty does not deter crime,” said Scientific American. Instead, it is “cruel and inhumane” without showing significant benefits.
Zimbabwe, whose president once faced the death penalty himself, abolished capital punishment after its senate approved a bill in December 2024. Before the bill was approved, said Amnesty International, there was a group pushing for it to remain “in the erroneous belief that it acts as a deterrent to crime”. But “no empirical evidence” exists to prove that it “results in the reduction of crimes worldwide”.
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 in 2022. But “ultimately, it provides capital punishment with its only truly moral foundation”.
The argument that the death penalty delivers closure for victims’ families is highly contested but often invoked by advocacy groups and those directly impacted. For the family of Jamie Rose Bolin, who was brutally murdered by neighbour Kevin Ray Underwood in 2006, the death penalty, carried out in December 2024, was “the only just punishment”, said USA Today.
Con: expensive and easily botched
The Trump administration’s push for states to escalate executions has led them to return to “unreliable” methods of killing prisoners – including lethal injection, which has the “worst track record of any method of execution” and can lead to long and torturous deaths, said Austin Sarat in The Guardian.
These concerns around lethal injection have led to the use of “alternative execution methods, like nitrogen gas”, which have led to failed or painful executions, said CNN.
The death penalty can also be a more expensive procedure for the state. In countries with arduous appeals processes and strong human-rights organisations, the death penalty is, counterintuitively, far more expensive than imprisonment for life.