Why the death penalty is incompatible with democracy

By Eric Heinze, Professor of Law, Queen Mary University of London

In the Athens of 399BC, a public assembly voted to put one of the city’s outstanding citizens to death: Socrates, one of the fathers of western philosophy. They convicted Socrates on trumped-up political charges, yet he accepted this sentence because it was democratically adopted by a majority of his fellow citizens.

Today’s democracies were designed precisely to avoid such miscarriages. Although many of them still imposed the death penalty until relatively recently, modern constitutions included…

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