The hangman is a disgrace to any civilised country. We depend, for our professional killers, on the type of person who voluntarily applies for the job of operating a rope and trapdoor. Murder is largely committed by insane or psychopathic people, to whom the death penalty has little or no meaning. Reliance on the death penalty discourages the reduction of crime which would follow an all-out attack on its social causes. The death penalty forgoes all hope of reforming the offender.
Executions magnify the unwholesome news value of murder reports, leading to imitative crime.
This is the one public problem, above all, in which governments should lead the governed. The Old Testament doctrine 'an eye for an eye', etc.' totally rejected by the New Testament, was in any event no more than a relic of a Babylonian law which 'prohibited the exaction of more than an eye for an eye'. Abolition of the death penalty has never made any difference to the number of murders in any country.