? Have you heard that old line about the operation was a success but the patient died? How about the unproven prosecution was a success but the innocent man was executed? Judges, prosecutors and police officers are the ‘laws’ but they’re still human beings. Humans naturally make mistakes. This is why I am opposed to the death penalty because human error happens. Fortunately the death penalty in the UK was abolished in 1965 but many countries worldwide still use this inhumane punishment. When we analyse the amount of people who were sentenced to hanging, the statistics of those who were innocent are simply unacceptable. Studies show that an appalling 4.1% of defendants in the modern era are innocent. It seems like a small percentage but that is not good enough, it is simply an astonishing statistic. Do you ever wonder how many people died innocent or wasted their precious life in prison on death row waiting for that fateful last day for a crime they did not commit? This is exactly what a Japanese man went through, Sakae Menda, who spent more than three decades on Japan’s death row as an innocent man. Menda was arrested in 1948 for murdering a priest and his wife. Not only the police held him for three weeks without access to a lawyer, they even tortured the helpless man into a confession. Eventually he was convicted in 1951 without any concrete evidence. This man spent those long thirty-four years in a solitary cell with no human interaction whatsoever before finally being released to freedom. In my opinion, killing a man is absolutely atrocious but the old saying “a life for a life” is simply barbaric and it shouldn't be something we should live by. Justice is served much better if the perpetrator has to spend a lifetime in solitary confinement reflecting and repenting on what he has done rather than being killed instantly not having to suffer at all. Furthermore, many states in America do not have a public defender system