The death penalty introduces a problem: irreversibility. A prison sentence can, in principle, be corrected. An execution cannot.
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South Africa is seething with anger – and with good reason.
A wave of violent crime has once again torn through communities, claiming dozens of lives in KwaMakhutha township in KwaZulu-Natal, Wedela on the West Rand and Lwandle in the Western Cape in just six days.
This follows the discovery of at least 12 bodies of women across Ekurhuleni since July.
The brutality has reignited calls for the return of the death penalty. But anger, however justified, cannot dictate policy.
SA abolished the death penalty in 1995, after the Constitutional Court declared it unconstitutional. The judgment recognised the horror of violent crime but rejected that the state should respond to killing by deliberately taking life.
Crucially, the court found no convincing evidence that execution was a greater deterrent to murder than life imprisonment. Three decades later, that question remains central.
Political leaders and the public are calling for a referendum on the reinstatement of the death penalty. But will executing criminals actually make South Africans safer?
If the objective is deterrence, the more urgent problem is not whether criminals fear execution. It is whether they believe they will be caught at all.
The greatest deterrent to crime is the likelihood that an offender will be apprehended, convicted and punished. That should be the national priority.
South Africa needs better-trained detectives, stronger crime intelligence, faster forensic investigations and properly resourced police stations.
DNA and ballistics evidence must move through laboratories faster. Witnesses must be protected.
Prosecutors must have the resources to pursue complex murder and organised crime cases. Illegal firearms must be aggressively targeted.
Most importantly, the state must make justice certain.
A criminal who believes there is little chance of being caught may not be thinking about whether the ultimate punishment is death or life imprisonment. The first calculation is whether the police will find them.
That is where South Africa must strike. This is not an argument for leniency.
Murderers must face serious consequences. Life imprisonment already provides the state with an exceptionally severe punishment, while permanently removing dangerous offenders from society where appropriate.
But the death penalty introduces another problem: irreversibility.
Courts can make mistakes. Investigations can fail. Evidence can be mishandled. Witnesses can lie or be mistaken. New evidence can emerge years later.
A prison sentence can, in principle, be corrected. An execution cannot.
South Africa’s response to violent crime cannot simply be to demand the harshest possible punishment. It must demand the most effective justice system possible.
We need a criminal justice system in which women can report violence and expect action – families can expect investigations, victims can expect support, witnesses can testify safely and perpetrators know that the state has the capacity and determination to find them.
The question confronting South Africa is not whether we can become more punitive, it is whether we can become more effective.
The families of those murdered do not need political slogans. They need arrests, prosecutions, convictions and justice.
South Africa does not need to bring back the gallows to prove it takes murder seriously. It needs to build a justice system from which murderers cannot escape.
That is how we protect life. And that is how we begin taking back our streets.
