The death penalty is a topic of great controversy, with many being on the extreme of either side. A country well-known for its use of the death penalty is China, which observed a steady decline in crime rate as the government became more active in hunting down criminals and handing out this ever-dreaded penalty. Despite its relative effectiveness in deterring crime, the social and moral implications of the death penalty are more destructive over time.
The first issue with the death penalty is that while the main goal of the justice system is undeniably to give punishment, rehabilitation is a vital aspect often overlooked. While the death penalty may remove what the justice system defines as a bad person from the world, rehabilitation offers the same except with the addition of a “good” or productive person in society. Countries such as those in Scandinavia have focused more on this approach and have seen much lower repeat offenders than countries that choose to rule with an iron fist.
The second issue with the death penalty is that there is no perfect judicial system in the world. Whether it be corruption or simple human error, even the most competent judicial systems with the best interest in mind for people are bound to make mistakes. Placing an innocent man in jail for twenty years is horrendous, but killing an innocent man magnitudes worse.
While one may argue that maybe the death of one innocent man is justifiable because if they were able to execute the correct man afterwards, perhaps more casualties from the guilty would be prevented. After all, aren't a few losses today alright if it means less or no losses tomorrow? While that mindset may sound logically and ethically sound at first, the simple fact is that it is not.
We must remember that we must not weigh the ethical soundness of an action based on the possibility that the action may produce, but instead, we must weigh the action in itself. In short, it doesn’t matter if killing that innocent man may have possibly saved more lives because you could simply put the alternate possibility that that innocent person could have used his life to save even more lives if he had survived. Therefore, the simple underline of the narrative must be that an innocent man was killed.
Lastly and most importantly, we have no right to say who lives or dies based on our perceptions of justice. At the end of the day, we are limited beings who cannot have the perfect sense of justice. Who are we to say that others deserve to die and we don’t? The most consequential issue with the death penalty is that death is irreversible and removes the possibility of a person changing for the better. As Christians, we cannot remove a person’s chance of finding Christ, as we too were criminals, undeserving of mercy and sentenced to eternal death.
To put it simply, we are flawed people in a flawed world that live day to day hoping and trying to be better than we were yesterday. Through not supporting death penalty, we give the opportunity of change to those who need it the most.
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