Are you for or against the death penalty?

Death penalty, a punishment which some nations take but not others, is still an issue much debated about today. Why should death penalty be allowed? - is it an effective deterrent or does it cost much less than to sentence life imprisonment? Whichever the cause, death penalty is an irreversible action and should be only taken as the last measure.

One possible argument for someone for death penalty could be the deterrence effect that it will have on other would-be criminals. As stated from the article, America’s crime rates has fallen as compared to Europe’s crime rates and the drop is said to be attributed to the greater use of punishment, which includes capital punishment. Hence, this would have concluded the effectiveness of the death penalty. However, statistics has shown otherwise, as shown in the online fact sheet about death penalty in US (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/FactSheet.pdf). The fact sheet showed that despite having the highest number of execution, the South has the highest murder rate and on the other hand, the Northeast has the lowest number of executions and also the lowest murder rate. Not only that the use of death penalty is ineffective to deter murderers from committing the crime, the money involved in allowing death penalties is also much higher than sending criminals to life imprisonment, as stated in the fact sheet. Hence, the use of death penalty is not only ineffective in deterring would-be criminals from committing crimes but is also expensive to maintain.

Furthermore, we should always remember that the act of execution (death penalty) is an irreversible action. Once it is carried out, it cannot be undone. Should there be any discrepancies in the judge’s judgment passed down after the execution, there is no way to reverse what has been done. Therefore, I am against the use of death penalties.

However, for each murderer executed, the number of murder cases would have decreased and this implies that for each murderer not executed, more innocent victims would die. As such, more lives would be taken by not having death penalties and in addition, these are innocent lives that would definitely be worth more than that of a murderer’s life. Thus, implementation of death penalties is also effective to a certain extent.