Pros and cons of using the death penalty

An MP has reignited the debate over the death penalty in Britain by calling for a “legally binding referendum”, as a new poll shows a majority of the public now support bringing it back.

Addressing the House of Commons last week, Rupert Lowe, the former Reform UK MP who now sits as an independent, said voters should be able 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.

Keir Starmer responded that while violent crimes “should be condemned” and dealt with by the police and courts, “re-introducing the death penalty is not the answer to this”.

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Recent decades have seen a “clear trend” away from capital punishment around the world, with “more than 70%” of countries having abolished the practice, said the Death Penalty Information Center, a US-based non-profit. Most of those who still carry out state executions are authoritarian regimes such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while the US “remains an outlier” among democracies for its use of the death penalty.

Here are some of the major arguments for and against capital punishment.

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 (53%) 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 this month 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.

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 in the past 50 years, at least 200 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 last year. 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. 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 recent 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.