There's been quite a bit of press coverage recently about a national petition to restore the death penalty. Reassuringly, a counter petition to maintain the current situation has also been launched and it has garnered significantly more signatures so far.
The death penalty is one of the fundamentally most stupid ideas that this world continues to entertain. It's something I've felt very strongly about since childhood, so I'm going to throw my tuppence in... and without even resorting to any liberal pleading or apologias!
It is not a deterrent. There is absolutely no reliable evidence that the death penalty, where it exists, acts as any form of deterrent to stop people committing crime. In fact, those states in the US where it is used tend to have higher rates of murder than others that don't have the death penalty. Maybe these states just have a higher rate of criminality. An alternative analysis would suggest that state-sponsored killing is more likely to breed murder as the lines between right and wrong are blurred for the people living there - how wrong is it to kill if a judge can order my death?
It is not cheap. One of the most ludicrous arguments for the death penalty is that it is cheaper than keeping someone locked up in prison, as if frugality is a sensible basis for a legal system. In any case, it is not cheaper, which is one of the reasons why many US states are thinking about giving it up. Once you factor in the costs of the procedure itself and the various legal fees spent by the state fighting appeals, it is almost always cheaper to imprison someone for life instead. And it gets even more expensive once you start executing innocent people by accident.
It gets things wrong. Legal history is littered with miscarriages of justice. Sometimes the jury makes a mistake, sometimes the police have lied, sometimes the expert witnesses turned out not to be experts and sometimes the scientific evidence was later disproved. Take DNA evidence for example. It is now widely recognised that the estimates of odds given in court cases in the early days of DNA evidence were wildly off beam - e.g. a one in a million chance was more like one in thousand. Every generation of science has an arrogance of certainty which the following generation often unpicks. But this isn't just something that happened in the past. It is still happening now, as the case of Cameron Todd Willingham attests, executed on the evidence of a fraudulent expert in 2004.
To give a UK example, consider the case of Sally Clark. Child murder is usually at the top of the list of crimes deserving of the death penalty according to those that advocate it. Sally Clark was convicted of murdering her two sons in 1996 and 1998. She almost certainly would have been lined up for execution for the 'crime'. The problem was, she didn't do it. Spurious statistics were wheeled out by 'experts' (later dismissed) to prove that she must have done it, but she didn't. She was finally released in 2003, having spent four years in prison for double child murder. (Despite her exoneration, she sadly drank herself to death in 2007 - either accidentally or deliberately.) You only need one mistake with the death penalty and the government and the legal system lose all moral authority.
Crime is a grey area. When pushed, most people can come up with a criminal who 'deserved' the death penalty, black and white cases where there is no doubt about guilt and long-term danger to society. The problem is that few criminal cases are like that. Most fall into a grey area - was the person sane at the time, were they provoked, was the eye-witness right, did they mean to kill, what about the years of domestic abuse and so on. And this is where few people can agree - where in the grey/black continuum does the death penalty line belong? The UK lacks distinctions within the crime of murder that the US has, for example.
This is even more marked if you place the issue in an historic setting. There are hundreds of crimes that used to carry the death penalty that no rational person would dream of applying it to now. Are we so sure that our legal system is right that we want to kill people based on it? Homosexuality carried the death penalty in the UK until 1861, for example. Was it morally right to kill gay people before then? No, of course not.
See... I managed it! Almost no appeals to heart-bleeding wishy-washy liberal values! The death penalty makes absolutely no sense whatever your political affliation and I encourage everyone reading this to sign the national petition to keep it out of our society.
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