By: Dr. Haytham Munir Ereifej
Jordan Daily - One of the most damaging flaws in the public debate over the death penalty is the way people are pushed into an emotional corner: What if the victim were your relative? What if the crime were especially horrific? What if your heart were filled with anger, grief, and pain? Would you support execution then?
But legislation cannot be built on moments of emotional outrage, personal suffering, or impulses of revenge, however understandable they may be on a human level. Law must be built on principle, not anger; on justice, not vengeance. When we discuss the death penalty, we are not discussing a personal reaction, an individual case, or a single country. We are confronting a larger and far more serious question: does the state have the right to kill in the name of justice?
The answer that increasingly imposes itself today, legally, morally, and from a human rights perspective, is no. The death penalty cannot be regarded as a triumph of justice. It is, rather, an admission of justice’s failure to impose a severe and fair punishment without taking life. A state that is supposed to protect the right to life cannot itself become the agent of killing under the cover of law. Modern justice is not measured by its ability to end a human life, but by its ability to protect society, punish the offender, and uphold fundamental principles at the same time.
The first and most obvious flaw in the death penalty is that it is irreversible. Investigations can be flawed. Courts can make mistakes. Evidence can be misread. New facts, confessions, witnesses, or scientific methods may later emerge and completely overturn a conviction. In cases of imprisonment, a wrongful judgment can be corrected. The state can reverse itself. Justice can, even if belatedly, acknowledge its error. But once an execution has been carried out, there is no correction, no apology that can restore a life wrongfully taken, and no law that can undo a death imposed in error. That fact alone is enough to make capital punishment unsafe in any human justice system, because human beings are fallible, and no court, however advanced, is infallible.
Then comes the most frequently repeated claim: that execution deters crime. Yet despite its popularity, that claim has never been conclusively proven. Countries that retain the death penalty have not become societies free of serious crime, nor has it been established that execution deters more effectively than life imprisonment or lengthy incarceration. Those who commit premeditated murder rarely stop to weigh the difference between death and a long prison sentence. They often act out of revenge, extremism, emotional collapse, or calculations in which deterrence has little real effect. A person who plans such a crime usually knows in advance that the punishment is severe and proceeds anyway. The death penalty therefore does not address crime at its roots, because it does not address the real causes: poverty, marginalization, social breakdown, extremism, the spread of weapons, drugs, and the absence of social justice.
Nor is the death penalty the neutral punishment it is often portrayed to be. In many countries, its application is shaped by poverty, inadequate legal defense, and social, racial, or political bias. As a result, justice becomes selective, and those who face execution are sometimes the weakest, not the most dangerous. In such cases, the punishment ceases to be a purely legal instrument and instead becomes a mirror reflecting deeper inequalities within society. Worse still, some regimes use it politically, not merely as a criminal sanction, but as a tool of intimidation, repression, and elimination under the banner of judicial legitimacy.
One of the deepest objections to execution is that it closes every door to review and reform. Imprisonment, however harsh, still leaves room for repentance, rehabilitation, clemency, reconciliation, or restorative justice where possible. Execution closes all those doors at once. It presents death as the final answer, as though the state were declaring its inability to achieve deterrence and protection except by erasing the human being altogether. At that point, justice descends from principle into vengeance, and from the logic of a modern state into the logic of primitive retaliation.
The gravest danger of the death penalty lies not only in the fact that it extinguishes a human life, but also in the way it corrupts the moral meaning of justice itself. When the state kills in the name of law, it does not reinforce the sanctity of life. It reinforces the notion that killing can become legitimate when carried out by official authority. Once death becomes an instrument of justice, the line between law and revenge is blurred, as is the line between the authority of the state and its violence, between justice for the victim and the satisfaction of public anger.
Opposition to the death penalty is not a defense of criminals, nor indifference to victims, nor a form of human rights idealism detached from reality, as some would suggest. It is a defense of a stronger, more balanced, and more principled justice, a justice that does not commit the very act it claims to punish. Society undoubtedly needs real and firm protection. But it does not need courts transformed into gates of death. A strong state is not the one that kills more. It is the one that tries fairly, punishes firmly, and protects society without descending into the abyss of organized killing in the name of law.
Jordan, under the leadership of His Majesty King Abdullah II, has in many instances approached this issue with a recognition that the value of life must remain supreme and that mercy should remain a central principle of justice. This is reflected in the Kingdom’s exceptional restraint in carrying out death sentences. Over more than twenty-five years, only a very limited number of executions have been implemented, and only under rare, exceptional, and carefully weighed circumstances. That restraint reflects an important truth: the strength of a state lies not in how readily it takes life, but in how wisely, lawfully, and humanely it chooses to preserve justice.
