Death Penalty Should Not Be Allowed

Ime
Deris
Iqbal
Roger
 INTRODUCTION
The first established death Total number of inmates 1279
penalty laws -Eighteenth death row in malaysia (2018)
Century B.C. in the Code of King
Hammurabi of Babylon, which Drug offenses 932
codified the death penalty for murder 317
25 different crimes.
A legal process whereby a person is
put to death by the state as a
punishment for a crime

• Death penalty is the ultimate warning and also as a crime

prevention and deterrent
• Also as a closure for victims- feeling of relief
• All criminal fear death
 BACKGROUND
Recently ,
• There are arguments among Malaysian’s law society that the death penalty to be abolished in
Malaysia.
• The death penalty served as a deterrent for crime and people assume that with death
penalty people would less likely to commit crime. And the safe society is not linked to the
death penalty (Aurelie Palacais, 2018)
• Based on the Article 5(1) of the Federal Constitution, people have the guarantee right to life
and liberty, thus a punishment that is cruel and arbitrary cannot be impose (N. Surendran,
2018)
• Many death penalty sentence in Malaysia are for drug cases and these are 100% drug mules
and not drug lords. The kingpins and drug lord never get caught. (Edmund Bon Tai Soon,
2018)
 PROBLEM STATEMENT
• death penalty is not the be all and end all for our criminal procedure. But
it should also be kept as an option for the courts if it is deemed fit to do
so, there are some criminals that simply do not deserve life due to what
they have done.
• Actually it’s not a question of if but when, we are going to execute a wrong
and innocent person if we do not abolished the death penalty and there is
a good chance we already did wrongly executed someone. What do we do
then if we wrongly execute a person? Forget about it and move on? And
let’s face it our police and judicial system are far from ideal. There are
criminals that deserve the death penalty, but do think of the innocent
ones that will be executed wrongly if we do not abolish the death penalty.
• Anti-death penalty advocates say that death penalty should be abolished
because it doesn't deter crime ( their favorite line), but even jails don't
deter crimes & are also cruel punishment, so if they follow their logic they
should demand government to also abolish jails, they don't make sense.
 OBJECTIVES
• To study whether death penalty should be
allowed.
• To give awareness to people about current
issues in Malaysia concerning about capital
punishment.
 PREVIOUS STUDY
• MICHAEL L. RADELET & TRACI L. LACOCK (2009) death penalty does not add deterrent effects to those already
achieved by long imprisonment.
• David Muhlhausen, PhD, Research Fellow in Empirical Policy Analysis at the Heritage Foundation (2014), states
that using a variety of samples and statistical methods, consistently demonstrate a strong link between executions
and reduced murder rates... In short, capital punishment does, in fact, save lives.
• Cass R. Sunstein, PhD, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, wrote in his Mar. 2005 paper "Is Capital
Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs” on papers.ssrn.com:

"[C]apital punishment may be morally required not for retributive reasons, but in order to prevent the taking of
innocent lives...
The foundation for our argument is a large and growing body of evidence that capital punishment may well have a
deterrent effect, possibly a quite powerful one. A leading study [The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Evidence
from a 'Judicial Experiment,' Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Joanna Shepherd, July 2003] suggests that each execution
prevents some eighteen murders, on average... If the current evidence is even roughly correct, then a refusal to impose
capital punishment will effectively condemn numerous innocent people to death...
Contrary to widely-held beliefs, based on partial information or older studies, a wave of recent evidence suggests the
possibility that capital punishment saves lives...
Capital punishment may well have strong deterrent effects; there is evidence that few categories of murders are
inherently un-deterrable, even so-called crimes of passion; some studies find extremely large deterrent effects; error
and arbitrariness undoubtedly occur, but the evidence of deterrence suggests that prospective murderers are receiving
a clear signal."