Should Death Penalty be Allowed in Our Country?

The scenario that a certain authority has the right to kill someone else doesn’t exist only in movies but also in the executive system in Taiwan. Capital punishment has been a difficult but popular debating topic for many and for long. According to a survey released by Ministry of Justice R.O.C. in 2007, 80% of residents in Taiwan thought that death penalty shouldn’t be abolished while 20% disagreed against the opinion, and 4% had no comment. That is to say, over two thirds of people in Taiwan are supportive of death penalty. In this case, however, I’m not one of them. I personally disagree with maintaining this punishment in Taiwan. In the contents below, I am going to explain why I think this way along with statistics accessed from some institutions.

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First, death penalty doesn’t always provide the sense of justice that the victims’ families require. In a research table published in Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology in 2013, 138 sets of families whose members were afflicted by death rows from 2006 to 2011 are collected and interviewed. The result shows that 35% of the respondents feel “the execution represents justice” while 31% of them feel “the execution represents closure or healing.” Of course, there are still many others who think that the punishment was too easy or justice hasn’t been done. At first glance, the numbers might show that death penalty brings more positive effects than negative ones to the victims’ families; however, we can also see that it is not the best way to give condolences.

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Secondly, while people think that death penalty efficiently deters criminals from committing serious crimes such as murder, the statistics show all but opposite. According to the survey of Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), within 1999 to 2010, the murder rates of non-death penalty states in America haven’t increased because of the abolition of capital punishment; rather, they have been declining, even hitting lower numbers than those in death penalty states. Another evidence is that New Mexico abolished death penalty in March 2009; however, the murder rates in New Mexico fluctuated a lot between 2009 and 2011, showing no reference to the existence or abolition of capital punishment. With these statistics, one can be sure that death penalty doesn’t necessarily pose a threat to criminals.

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Lastly, carrying out capital punishments is not really cost-effective. Many people claim that death penalty should be implemented because the prisoners live on the taxes we pay. Why do we have to keep death row prisoners alive using innocent people’s money? Yet, this kind of interpretation is wrong because implementing death penalty actually costs more than it has to be afforded to imprison a criminal for his or her entire life.

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A study in California revealed that the cost of the death penalty in the state has been over $4 billion since 1978. Study considered pre-trial and trial costs, costs of automatic appeals and state habeas corpus petitions, costs of federal habeas corpus appeals, and costs of incarceration on death row. (Alarcon & Mitchell, 2011). As we can see, implementing death penalty not only costs a lot, but also requires a lot of manpower. As mentioned previously, in terms of the required justice for the victims’ families, the high cost of money and manpower, and the ambiguous deterrence, I don’t think death penalty should be allowed in Taiwan. In my point of view, implementing capital punishment is not the best solution to all the crimes. This topic has much more to be discussed than we can count, and I’m pretty sure that people would keep debating about it. Still, the one and only thing to me is that it is important for the victims’ families and friends to figure out how to move forward.

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References

Ministry of Justice, R.O.C. (2007). 96 年 台 灣 地 區 死 刑 存 廢 問 題 之 民 意 調 查 報 告 書. Retrieved from:

https://www.moj.gov.tw/lp-143-001.html

Alarcon & Mitchell. (2011). Costs of Capital Punishment in California: Will Voters Choose Reform this November? Digital Commons at Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. Retrieved from:

https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2803&context=llr

Death Penalty Information Center. (N/A) Murder Rate of Death Penalty States Compared to Non-Death Penalty States. Retrieved from:

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates/murder-rate-of-death-penalty-states-compared-to-non-death-penalty-states

Burton, C. & Tewksbury, R. (2013). How Families of Murder Victims Feel Following the Execution of Their Loved One’s Murderer: A Content Analysis of Newspaper Reports of Executions from 2006-2011. Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology. Retrieved from:

https://www.jqcjc.org/documents/v1i1.pdf