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Is the death penalty justice or revenge?
With 2,474 people on US death row in 2025 and debates raging globally, UnHerd’s Editor-in-Chief Freddie Sayers sits down with Peter in this latest episode, to go through his arguments, tackling such concerns like the risks of executing the innocent and the efficacy of deterrence, as well as how Peter – a committed Anglican – reconciles his position with his Christian faith.
In the US, despite capital punishment being abolished in 1965, new polling shows younger generations now favor it (even above some older groups), perhaps spurred by rising crime and cases like Axel Rudakubana’s murder of three girls in Southport. But flaws in the criminal justice system continue to be exposed as news of the longest miscarriage of justice emerges with the freeing of Peter Sullivan, once convicted of the brutal 1986 murder of florist Diane Sindall, having served 38 years in prison.
The conversation around capital punishment resurfaces once again amid increasing calls for it to be reintroduced, and MPs, like Lee Anderson and Richard Tice, demanding national debate.
Peter Hitchens is as usual utterly maddening not by reason of the content of his input but by its manner. He puts arguments with which I often agree but which usually go against the zeitgeist and are therefore controversial as a man of his obvious intelligence surely knows. Nevertheless he delivers these arguments in a maddening downbeat drawl, on and on, as if they are not controversial at all. One suspects I’m afraid that he is just enjoying waving a red rag at a bull. That’s self indulgent and does him no credit given the seriousness of the subject under discussion which he constantly affirms.
Not to mention the Hitchens brothers’ trademark of constantly interrupting and talking over (very loudly) his interlocutor, in this case the superhumanly patient Freddie Sayers.
He may, he does, write like an angel and his comments are nearly always valuable, but as an interviewee his faults are unbearable . I managed to listen to the first fifteen minutes or so of this interview but eventually could endure no longer.
Keep printing him Freddie but for pity’s sake let this be the last interview.
”Thou shalt not murder” (the shedding of INNOCENT blood)
“He who sheds innocent blood by man shall his blood be shed”
Almighty God commanded the death penalty for murder. He made provision for manslaughter by providing cities of refuge for those who had killed unintentionally.
Why did God command the death penalty for murder?
Because God was, and is repulsed by the shedding of INNOCENT blood and because He ‘saw the end from the beginning’ ie He saw precisely how the rate of murder would increase without it.
Ask the ‘common people’ ie those disproportionately affected by murder ( knife crime?) how they feel about the death penalty. They have ‘skin in the game’ as the saying goes.
When talking about the death penalty with someone, I usually say “ Is our society any better (safer) today in its absence? The answer is invariably “no”.