The argument for and against capital punishment is based on moral, practical, religious and even emotional grounds.

Advocates of the death penalty argue that it deters crime, provides closure for surviving victims and loved ones, and improves the status of the community by making sure that convicted criminals do not commit the same offence – in essence they believe in; “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

How has and how will capital punishment prove daunting to criminals?

What proof do we have that criminals are even the slightest bit intimidated by death or even the thought of being killed?

If we really want to keep them away from society then we need to keep them clamped down where they will not be able to do harm to themselves or to others.

The money that we would spend constructing the gallows let us use it to reconstruct the prisons to ensure that rehabilitation takes place.

We have gullies to clean, roads to be fixed, bushes to be cut down, garbage to be picked up and sewage plants to be maintained.

Let us have these criminal elements channel the same energy they used to murder people into working for the country and for the families that they have wronged.

Too often we see murderers walk free after their trials because there is not enough evidence to prove their guilt.

Let us use taxpayers’ money instead to upgrade and equip the security forces so they will be better able to fight crime and find enough evidence to convict these criminals to keep them behind bars.

Yes, we want revenge, but this slobbering for blood will do us no good as either an individual or as a nation.

I am yet to see some evidence to support the deterrent effect in Jamaica.

I am yet to hear from a psychiatric point-of-view how these criminals react to the threat of being hanged.

How will this act to keep the death penalty be viewed by the international community?

What effect will it have on our already dawdling tourism sector? Hanging is in my opinion barbaric and reinstating it would make us no less morally depraved than those in the Klu Klux Clan.

This is what I am for, restorative justice and not retributive justice. Jamaica, let us move as if we are in the 21st century and not look backward to a derelict past.

Sophia Morgan is enrolled with the Northern Caribbean University’s Mandeville Campus

Email: norlynemorgan@yahoo.com