Uganda’s judicial system just handed down a death sentence to a man who murdered four children. The headlines scream about "justice served" and "the ultimate price." They lean on the emotional weight of a tragedy to justify a barbaric relic of colonial-era law.
Most people see a death sentence and feel a sense of closure. They think the monster is gone, the scales are balanced, and the community is safer. They are wrong on every count. Learn more on a related topic: this related article.
This isn’t about defending a murderer. It’s about dismantling the lazy consensus that state-sanctioned killing fixes broken societies. If you think a rope or a firing squad solves the problem of mass violence, you aren’t paying attention to how systems actually work.
The Deterrence Myth is Dead
The most common argument for the death penalty is that it scares others out of committing similar atrocities. This is a fairy tale. More journalism by The New York Times highlights related views on this issue.
Data from across the globe, including decades of research by organizations like Amnesty International and the Death Penalty Information Center, shows zero correlation between the existence of the death penalty and lower homicide rates. In fact, many countries that abolished the practice saw crime rates drop or remain stable.
Violence is rarely a calculated risk. A man walking into a nursery school with a machete isn't performing a cost-benefit analysis. He isn't weighing the possibility of a life sentence versus the gallows. He is operating in a state of psychological collapse, radicalization, or pure nihilism. You cannot deter someone who has already abandoned their own humanity.
By the time the judge puts on the black cap, the state has already failed. The death penalty is a reactive, expensive admission of defeat. It is the government trying to kill its way out of its inability to prevent the crime in the first place.
The High Cost of Performance Justice
There is a financial and systemic arrogance in capital punishment that few want to admit.
In many jurisdictions, the legal gymnastics required to ensure a death sentence is "fair" cost significantly more than housing a prisoner for life. We pour millions into the machinery of death—appeals, specialized housing, high-security execution chambers—while the social services that could have identified a dangerous individual months earlier are starved of funding.
We are spending a premium to create a spectacle of finality. It’s performance justice. It makes the public feel good for a week while doing absolutely nothing to address the systemic rot, the lack of mental health infrastructure, or the security lapses that allowed four children to die.
The Inevitability of the Error
Let’s talk about the math of the "perfect" judicial system. It doesn’t exist.
Every system run by humans contains a margin of error. When the punishment is a prison term, you can release an innocent person and offer reparations. When the punishment is death, the error is permanent. Since 1973, over 190 people on death row in the United States have been exonerated. These weren't "technicalities." These were people who were factually innocent, saved only by the eleventh-hour discovery of DNA evidence or a witness admitting they lied.
Uganda's judicial system, like many others, struggles with limited resources and corruption. To believe that this system will never, ever make a mistake is a level of blind faith that bordering on the delusional. If you support the death penalty, you are implicitly saying you are comfortable with the state occasionally murdering an innocent person in your name.
Killing as a Distraction
The media and the public love the death penalty because it provides a clean ending to a messy story. It allows us to point at a "monster" and say, "That’s where the evil is. Now that he’s gone, we are good again."
This is a dangerous lie.
Violence is a symptom. When we focus all our energy on the execution of one individual, we stop asking why the violence happened. We stop looking at the security protocols at the school. We stop looking at the communal failures that allowed a person to radicalize or lose their mind in isolation.
The death sentence is a rug we use to sweep the real problems under. It provides the illusion of a solution while the environment that produced the killer remains unchanged. Another killer is already being formed in the shadows of the same broken system, and he isn't afraid of the hangman.
The Moral Bankruptcy of "Closure"
Psychologists have often found that the "closure" promised to victims' families by an execution is a myth.
The legal process for a death sentence can drag on for a decade or more. Families are forced to relive the trauma through endless appeals and media cycles. Instead of healing, they are tethered to the killer for years, waiting for a finality that often feels hollow when it finally arrives.
True justice would be a system that ensures no other parent has to bury their child. True justice would be a lifelong sentence where the perpetrator is forced to live with the weight of their actions in total anonymity, stripped of the "martyrdom" or the notoriety that often accompanies a high-profile execution.
The State Should Not Have This Power
At its core, this is a question of the relationship between a citizen and the state.
Giving a government the power to legally kill its own people is the ultimate surrender of civil liberty. You might trust the current administration to only kill the "real" monsters, but you are setting a precedent that any future regime—no matter how corrupt or tyrannical—can use to eliminate whoever they deem a threat.
If you give the state the power of life and death, you shouldn't be surprised when they eventually use it against someone who doesn't deserve it.
Stop Clapping for the Rope
We need to stop celebrating these verdicts as victories. A man is going to die, and four children are still dead. Nothing has been gained.
If we want to actually stop the next nursery school massacre, we have to move past the bloodlust of the courtroom. We need to invest in the boring, difficult work of social intervention, community policing, and psychological support.
The death penalty is the easy way out for a government that doesn't want to do the hard work of building a safe society. It is a primitive response to a modern crisis. Until we demand a system that prioritizes prevention over retribution, we are just waiting for the next tragedy to justify the next execution.
The state is not a god. It should stop acting like one.
