Band 6+: Some people advocate the death penalty for those who committed violent crimes. Others say that capital punishment is unacceptable in contemporary society. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of the death penalty and give your opinion. Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Recently, there have been clamor for use of death penalty for individuals that partook in violent crimes, while there are also other school of thoughts that believes death penalty should not have any use in our modern society. I will be writing on both the advantages and disadvantages of death penalty and concluding with my own stance on the matter.

One of the advantages of the death penalty as a punishment for violent crimes is the determent of further aggressive crimes by individuals in the society. When people know the gravity of the crime they are about to commit, it will stop them from going further in doing that. For example, the use of capital punishment in North Korea has made the country one of the fewer countries with incident of violent crimes in the world.

Another advantage of capital punishment is that it reduces the ample time needed by a criminal to get away with crime. There are a lot of corruption going on in the society and not using the death penalty gives people that have high connections and are wealthy to get away with the crime they have committed. One notable case is that of Oscar Pistorius of South Africa. An athlete that murdered his girlfriend but was later released after spending ten years in prison.

However, the disadvantage of death penalty is that sometimes there are miscarriage of justice either knowingly or unknowingly. Innocent people might be implicated in crimes they did not commit and the hammer of capital punishment would have fallen on them before further evidence that will exonerate them surface. I remember the case of the popular ALUU 4. The four students that were implicated for armed robbery and later killed only to found out later that they were innocent.

In as much as the use of death penalty will deter further violent crimes, it is still better to err on the part of one innocent person being spared even if evidence surface twenty years later than multiple guilty people being given the death penalty. With this reason, I will be opposing the use of capital punishment in our society.