Wayne Couzens is due to be sentenced today for the rape and murder of Sarah Everard after a two-day sentence hearing. It’s hard to imagine a more depraved crime – I’m sure we’re all haunted by the harrowing footage of Couzens stopping Sarah in the street, and the grim events that unfolded afterwards.
As ever, when crimes like this occur it leads to a lot of people calling for capital punishment. An eye for an eye. Does Wayne Couzens and others like him deserve to breathe the same air as us?
What’s the point of letting him wallow in a maximum security prison, at taxpayers’ expense, for the rest of his life? We’ll be paying for Wayne Couzens to eat, drink, have a bed, potentially a TV in his prison cell…we’d stop paying for him once he’d been executed.
Public opinion on the death penalty is pretty split – stats show that 41% of people think the death penalty should be enforced for people who murder a police officer, 54% for terrorists who kill, 50% for the murder of a child, 54% for multiple murders and 32% for all cases of murder.
The big question is - is it actually a deterrent? Figures appear to show that the death penalty doesn’t actually deter crime - 83% of US states without the death penalty had homicide rates below the national average, for example.
In fact, three countries were responsible for almost 90% of the executions world’s executions; Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – do we really want to group ourselves in with those nations?
China executes people on an industrial scale – they even harvest their organs afterwards. Again, do we want to be in the same bracket as China?
Some people say that murderers and paedophiles just don’t deserve to live anymore, they should just die because of who they are and what they’ve done. I can understand that.
Former Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens, 48, will appear at the Old Bailey in London for the second day of a sentence hearing after pleading guilty to the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
Elizabeth Cook
Here’s where I’m at – many of the sickest, most twisted people on earth actually want to die after they get caught. Wayne Couzens reportedly repeatedly self-harmed by banging his head against a sink and running into a wall, he’s being constantly monitored to make sure he doesn’t kill himself.
So why give him what he wants? Harold Shipman killed himself, Fred West…if these people don’t want to live anymore then why help them out? Surely it’s more of a punishment to make them live with their crimes for decades?
Then there’s the issue of – how do we know we’ve definitely got the conviction right? People say, if they plead guilty then we know they did it – yes, fair enough, but the benefit offered to many people who plead guilty is that they then avoid the death penalty, so that doesn’t really work. It’s designed to secure quick convictions and give families of the victims some swift justice.
Personally, I’d be more inclined to go for physical punishment. If the worst criminals in society knew that we wouldn’t execute them, instead they got 100 lashes of an industrial strength cane once a week, I personally think that would be more of a deterrent than a lethal injection.
At the very least, surely these criminals should be given no entertainment in prison whatsoever. I’d be pretty happy for them to be strapped to a bed 24/7, staring at the ceiling, while being fed through a tube.
As we await the sentencing of Wayne Couzens today, where do you stand – would you bring back the death penalty?