The Cost of Retaining the Death Penalty: Some Lessons from the American Experience
111 South African Law Journal 55 (1994)
15 Pages Posted: 6 Feb 2017
Date Written: 1994
Abstract
The United States and South Africa stand alone as the only two western industrialized nations that retain the death penalty. In order to analyze how the death penalty, if retained, is likely to operate under a post-apartheid constitutional structure that contains a bill of rights, it will be useful to compare it with how the death penalty currently operates in the United States under a similar system. Such an examination will show two things. As in the United States, a death penalty scheme that meets the minimum requirements of a criminal justice system that protects fundamental rights of the accused will burden the entire criminal justice system by calling into question the ability of that system to guarantee a just result in judicial proceedings. Moreover such a system will exert a great cost, in terms of both judicial and other resources. The conclusion to which this analysis will lead is that any societal benefit that may come from the existence of the death penalty will be greatly outweighed by the problems and expenses that it will inevitably create.
Keywords: Death Penalty, Capital Punishment, South Africa
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