Should The Death Penalty Be Abolished In South Africa

The death penalty has been abolished in South Africa since 1995 due to its infringement of two of the most important values entrenched in the Bill of Rights in the 1994 Constitution. The death penalty or capital punishment was authorised as a competent sentence for murder and other such heinous crimes by section 277 of the Criminal Procedure Act. It was in the ground breaking case of S v Makwanyane that the Constitutional Court abolished the death penalty as it held that capital punishment infringed the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment in section 11(2) of the interim Constitution , as well as the rights to life and dignity which are considered the most important of all human rights. The last person to be executed in South Africa was Solomon Ngobeni, who was hanged in 1989, after which President De Klerk put a moratorium on the death penalty in 1990 . A lot of countries that use the death penalty claim that it is a way in which to reduce crime . If South Africa were to reinstate the death penalty it would be one of 59 countries across the world to have the death penalty . The death penalty can be executed in a number of ways, such as beheading, hanging, lethal injection, shooting and even in some rare cases,

Why South Africa should not reinstate the death penalty will be discussed in terms of the death penalty’s infringement of the values and rights of human dignity as well as the right to freedom and security entrenched in the Constitution, the cruelty of the death penalty, and the effectiveness of capital punishment as a method to reduce