COMMENT | Should SA consider reintroducing the death penalty?

South Africa is once again at a crossroads.

Emotions are running high, and justifiably so.

Women continue to lose their lives in circumstances that expose the frightening extent of gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) in our society.

The latest developments in Gauteng have only deepened these concerns.

Police have confirmed that the number of women whose bodies have been discovered in and around Kempton Park and elsewhere in Ekurhuleni has risen to 9 (as of Thursday evening).

These developments demand an urgent response from the state.

They also require us to have an honest conversation about the root causes of gender-based violence and femicide.

Otherwise, we risk getting the diagnosis wrong and administering the wrong medicine to the patient.

For the first time since the Constitutional Court’s 1995 judgment in S v Makwanyane , which abolished the death penalty, South Africans from across the political spectrum have increasingly called for a more retributive criminal justice system.

Among the prominent voices supporting tougher punishment is the president, who has called for perpetrators of rape and gender-based violence to receive life sentences and face the harshest possible prison conditions.

The anger behind these demands is understandable.

However, anger must not displace reason.

Reintroducing capital punishment (the death penalty) would not necessarily address the causes of violence, and it would create the irreversible possibility of wrongful executions.

More fundamentally, there is no convincing basis for assuming that inflicting greater violence through punishment will, by itself, eliminate violence in society.