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Why Death Penalty Should Not

Be Allowed in Taiwan

        Death penalty has been a vigorously debated issue around the world, and Taiwan is no exception. On March 2020, forty prisoners are on death row in Taiwan. Only three death-row prisoners have been executed in the last five years. The frequency of execution is low, but death penalty is still a popular and controversial topic. Every time a cruel murder happens, this issue resurfaces in Taiwanese media. An example of this is the 2014 Taipei Metro attack. At that time this topic was widely discussed because many people demanded capital punishment for the attacker Cheng Chieh. Both sides offered numerous points, but a consensus has yet to be reached. Although many people support death penalty, I am against it because it is not an effective deterrent and wrongful convictions may happen as a consequence.

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        First of all, death penalty cannot deter crimes. Many people fear that once death penalty is abolished, crime rates will rise. However, research has shown that their worries is unnecessary. In a master's thesis written by Yang (2007), she used data from 1973 to 2005 to analyze the relationship between capital punishment and crime rate. She concluded that "in general, executed rate has no deterrent effect on criminal occurring rate.” Another thesis by Hwang (2005) found out that no evidence showed death penalty can deter violent crime in Taiwan from 1995 to 2005. The statistic from other countries also supports this point. A survey conducted by the New York Times found that US states without death penalty have lower homicide rates than states with death penalty. It mentioned that the rates are 48% to 101% lower in non-death penalty states (Fessenden, 2000). This proves that abolishing the death penalty will not make the crime rate go up.

        Secondly, wrongful convictions cannot be avoided as long as death penalty is legal. Since judges are also human beings, there is a chance that they will make a wrong decision. However, an unjust death penalty is so much worse than other kinds of unjust punishment. Once an innocent person is executed, no compensation can bring that person back. A famous example is Jiang Guo-Qing. Capital punishment should only be legal under the condition of an absolutely fair judicial system and no wrongful conviction. However, such a condition is impossible. In 2016, at least 60 death-row prisoners around the world were found innocent and released (Amnesty International, 2017). Taiwan’s judiciary is far from perfect. In her report Unsafe Convictions in Capital Cases in Taiwan, Hoyle (2019) analyzed 62 death penalty convictions from 2006 to 2015 in Taiwan. She found ten seriously flawed judgments. Since capital punishment always carries the risk of innocent lives, it should not be legalized in Taiwan.

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        While some people may support death penalty because they don’t want to waste their tax on these criminals, capital punishment is seldom cheaper than a prison sentence. According to the Prison Act of Taiwan, all prisoners except those on death row have to work to pay for part of their fee in prison and for victim compensation. However, death-row prisoners don't have to work because they are deemed no longer returning to society. They are kept in prison just to wait for the execution or in case something new is discovered about their cases. Like dead people, they have no obligation to contribute to society. Thus, the government spent more money on raising death-row prisoners than on raising other prisoners. However, pro-death penalty people may say that this problem can be solved by swift trials and executions. Then, they will not waste so much money in prison. In reality, this will make the judicial process problematic. An example of this is Cheng Chieh. His trials and execution only took a year. His attorneys were going to file for a retrial and a constitutional interpretation, but they did not have the time to do that before the execution. His family and attorneys were not notified before the execution, either. His crime was indeed horrifying, but he still deserved a fair process like other criminals. It is extremely rare that a death-row prisoner was executed within such a short period of time. In fact, all death penalty convictions in Taiwan have to be affirmed by the supreme court. Thus, some cases took decades before receiving the final sentence. A significant amount of money is spent on years of trials and prisons. A study of the cost of the death penalty in California came to the conclusion that “abolishing the death penalty will result in the immediate savings of millions of dollars per year” (Alarcon & Mitchell, 2011). On top of that, a wrongful conviction is even costlier. For example, the compensation for Jiang Guo-Qing is more than one hundred and three million NTD. Abolishing the death penalty can actually save more money for the government.

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        Even though the majority of Taiwanese people support death penalty, there is no evidence that it can deter crimes. Current Taiwan judiciary cannot avoid wrongful convictions. It is also costly. Thus, I do not think death penalty should be allowed in Taiwan. There are more disadvantages than advantages when it comes to death penalty. I firmly believe that Taiwanese society will be better off without it.

References

  1. 楊書晴 (2007)。死刑嚇阻效果之探討。逢甲大學經濟學所碩士論文，台中市。取自https://hdl.handle.net/11296/572y2r

  2. 黃沄清 (2005)。死刑對重大暴力犯罪嚇阻功能之研究。國立中山大學公共事務管理研究所，高雄市。取自https://hdl.handle.net/11296/8ndjps

  3. Fessenden, F. (2000). Deadly Statistics: A Survey of Crime and Punishment. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/22/us/deadly-statistics-a-survey-of-crime-and-punishment.html

  4. Amnesty International. (2017). The Death Penalty in 2016: Facts and Figures. Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/04/death-penalty-2016-facts-and-figures/

  5. Carolyn Hoyle. (2019). Unsafe Convictions in Capital Cases in Taiwan. The Death Penalty Project. Retrieved from https://www.deathpenaltyproject.org/knowledge/unsafe-convictions-in-capital-cases-in-taiwan-2019/

  6. Alarcon, A. & Mitchell, P. (2011). Executing the Will of the Voters?: A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle. Los Angeles. Retrieved from https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/california-cost-study-2011

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