Is Capital punishment ethical?

Imagine you were sentenced to 31 years in prison for a rape and murder you didn’t commit. Imagine you were wrongfully convicted for 17 years for the arson and murder of your three-year-old child who died in an accidental fire. These are both real cases, with small resolutions in their terrible stories being that those two people were eventually exonerated and released from prison once proven innocent. 

Wrongful imprisonment is not as uncommon as you may think and according to CCRC and the 10,000 cases that they have studied, they have found that 7% of cases were people who were innocent. And this was in Australia, a country that is much less corrupt than those who support Capital Punishment. 

Now, imagine those same scenarios from before, but instead of receiving lifetime imprisonment with a small chance of exoneration, you are locked in solitude and sentenced to death. This, as well as racially motivated convictions and wrongful abuse of power, is what many people choose to overlook when supporting Capital Punishment. This is the extremely outdated form of law enforcement that for some reason, is still practised today in 54 different countries around the world.

Death row is expensive and inefficient. According to the Death Penalty Information Centre website, there have been at least 190 people that have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to their death since 1973. Just to put that in perspective for you, that means that every year nearly 4 completely innocent human beings are murdered by the government, only for them to find out later that they were innocent. 

Death row is a waste of money, waste of resources, waste of time and most importantly, an incredibly disappointing waste to take innocent people's lives away from them. The governments that use Capital Punishment set a poor example of right and wrong to their citizens because as a minimum, the civil society, the state, the government should not kill it’s own citizens, comparing that ideology to some of the most repressive regimes in the world that support Capital Punishment such as Iran, China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia, clearly demonstrates that the link between them is no coincidence.

Our government is supposed to protect and look after us but in return, they murder their own citizens for Revenge. It is not justice or their right to do this, but cruelty that has been accepted and welcomed with open arms by these governments. 

If you still don’t believe that revenge is the only thing that is gained from Capital Punishment, it’s important for you to realise that Capital Punishment causes no change in crime rates. None. Law Professor Jeffery Fagan states that there is "no credible scientific evidence that the death penalty deters criminal behaviour.” bringing into question, the purpose of Capital Punishment. What is it exactly?

Capital Punishment is racially biased as  most of the people on death row are people of colour. Amnesty International states that Capital Punishment “is often used against the most vulnerable in society, including the poor, ethnic and religious minorities, and people with mental disabilities. Some governments use it to silence their opponents.” 

As of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims. Furthermore, White victims make up approximately half, of all murder victims, with 80% of all Capital cases involving white victims.

There is a clear and evident problem with these statistics that doesn’t add up, and the answer is abuse of power and discrimination. 

“The death penalty violates the most fundamental human right – the right to life. It is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment." - (Amnesty International) People should not be able to make the judgment of whether someone should be legally murdered. Most Catholics support this perspective that, quote, “life is a gift from God, [and] therefore God alone has the power to take [it].”

The alternative to Capital Punishment should be life in prison. Not only does this give the prisoners a chance to rehabilitate and redeem themselves. It allows them to have the opportunity to grow a much more healthy mindset if that is what they desire, while still forcing them to live with, and process the crimes that they have committed. In some cases, these people can turn their lives around, which wouldn’t happen if they were dead.

In Conclusion, The act of capital punishment itself is unethical. I think everyone deserves to have the right to live, and I think, completely taking that quality away from human beings should not be an option that was ever on the table in the first place. The alternative to Capital Punishment, life in prison, is a humane option. Not only does this give the prisoners a chance to rehabilitate and redeem themselves, it allows them to have the opportunity to grow a much more healthy mindset if that is what they desire, while still forcing them to live with, and process the crimes that they have committed. In some cases, these people can turn their lives around, which as demonstrated in the beginning, wouldn’t be possible if they were dead. Death is final and our legal system, like the humans it governs, is imperfect. To trust it with our own lives is folly and it’s time that the world moves past this barbaric ideology of “an eye for an eye” that we should have put behind us thousands of years ago.