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Advantages
- Gives closure to the victims’ families
- The ultimate deterrent - death
- Forensics are now more advanced, so wrongful execution can be avoided
- If an offender is not euthenised, they could escape prison and go on to kill again (these cases are however, rare.
- Alleviates prison overcrowding
- guilty people deserve to be punished in proportion to the severity of their crime
- Removes any potential danger to prison staff and other inmates
- Incentive to help police - bargaining tool for a reduced sentence , if the sentence is death then offenders will be more likely to want to help police & keep themselves alive.
- Japanese argument - used sparingly, but keeps social cohesion & belief that bad things happen to those who deserve it. Therefore reinforcing the belief that good things happen to good people & reinforcing social values/socially desired behaviour
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Disadvantages
- Financial cost to taxpayers - more than keeping someone in prison for life
- Endless appeals clog up the CJS
- 'Eye for an eye' policies do not show that society has advanced - vengeance, not retribution
- Traumatic for both the family & defendent
- Discriminatory - mostly people who are from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, or belonging to a minority are mostly sentenced. Mentally ill inmates may also be put to death
- Counter-productive - creates sympathy for perpetrators of heinous crimes
- Doesn't bring the victim back to life - just takes another life, and so may not actually provide closure to victim's family
- What if the decision is wrong - wrongly convicted - IT IS IRREVERSIBLE - since 1937, more than 160 prisoners sent to death row in the USA have later been exonerated/released on the grounds of innocence
- Some countries use the death penalty on those under 18, going against international law (since 1990, Amnesty international has documented at least 149 executions of child offenders in 10 countries)
- Often used within skewed CJ systems - as a political tool for example
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