Is the death penalty justified?

During the Nazi regime, death through gas chambers was extremely popular and put a ‘mere’ 6000 Jews to death. This is genocide. Currently, the United States holds a record of 1481 (since 1976) deaths due to the death penalty. In 2017, 2591 people were killed due to death sentences in over 53 countries. Currently, 21,919 people are under the death sentence, where inmates spend roughly 15 years waiting for their inevitable demise. Now, this is nowhere ‘close’ to the deaths due to gas chambers but in times where revolts, protests, social media campaigns and ethics outlaw genocide, is it really moral to use the death penalty as a punishment?

Drawing parallels to the gas chambers, Hitler would have spent a scanty hundred thousand US Dollars, for all four camps in Auschwitz. But the death penalty now costs much more. It costs a taxpayer $90000 more for death penalty inmates. If it costs the average taxpayer approximately $31,286 to keep a prisoner in jail for his entire life then it costs taxpayers $121,286 for the death penalty (per annum). Converting that to Indian rupees, over half the Indian population would be in paramount debt right now. Harm Reduction International confirmed that 33 nations have sentenced inmates to the death penalty for drug offences... but I don’t see the elicitation of drugs disuniting anytime soon. The point is simple; the death penalty is a burden costing much more than the population should have to pay, but getting nowhere in terms of serving justice.

In a previous paragraph, genocide was brought up. According to the Cambridge dictionary, genocide is the murder of a whole group of people. If there are 714 people waiting on the death sentence in California, does this mean the death penalty is genocide or, more formally put, ‘legal homicide.’ The question here, is not if this murder is truly legal but if it should be legal. The death penalty is usually ‘awarded’ to criminals for homicide. If today's judicial system truly follows an ‘eye for an eye’ attitude towards these prisoners, does it make the whole world blind? In 2017, Keith Tharpe, on trial for the murder of his sister-in-law was called “n*gger” by his juror and was executed on 26th September in Georgia. Simple bias is a factor here, he didn't cognate with Keith's culture and therefore wanted to sentence him to death.

Back when I was 6, I wholly admired the song ‘The Circle of Life’ from The Lion King. What I didn’t realize at the time was it’s connection to so many global issues. The hypocrisy of the death penalty makes my stomach ache. If killing is how we justify a victim’s pain and turmoil, then do inmates suddenly become the victim? In North Korea, holding prisoners under death sentences is quite typical, but actually killing them is not. The traumatic psychological effects of these are immense; and hence, a probable reason behind why prisoners commit suicide on death row so often. The effects don’t just impact prisoners but citizens too - stories of suicide build a cove of distrust and fear. Is this what the government wants to achieve with the capital punishment?  Instead of countries pooling in their resources to find truly dangerous criminals, they spend all their revenue on death sentences, which half the time don’t even happen due to the aforementioned suicide rates.

Death penalties have a lot of a lot of faults: bias, economic effects, phycological impacts, too many mishaps and the cherry on top; just being ineffective. As the Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said: “there’s no justice in killing in the name of justice.” States of the European Union have moved to more pacifist approaches to arson and death. The results have truly been miraculous. In the USA, death penalty is favourably looked upon, with no results the country can brag about. The truth is death penalties should be banned, but the idea is superficial and as citizens, we must question ‘why?’

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Written by Nethra Jaygopal

Edited by Nandini Nalam