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Join on Telegram Before you dive into this article, I want you to picture a young man in his twenties, raised in a marginalized neighborhood, who dropped out of school early, never found decent work, had no future within reach, and ended up addicted to drugs. You probably know someone like him. This young man was not born violent, nor did he ever aspire to become one. He is the product of a system that, after having failed him entirely, then turns around to act surprised by the consequences of its own making.
The May 6 verdict of a crime that had taken place a month earlier at Tangier’s Sour El Maakazine shook the conscience of an entire city. Two men hurled a victim from the top of a wall, then robbed him as he lay dying, for fifty dirhams. Fifty dirhams was the price of a human life. No one who reads that can suppress the fury, the grief, and the demand for swift, uncompromising justice. I personally share that fury. Impunity is its own injustice.
But fury is not a policy. And the question we owe the victims — all victims, past and future — is not which punishment feels most satisfying in this moment. Instead, it is this: Will the death penalty save society from the spiral of crime? Every credible answer, from every corner of scientific research, points towards a resounding “no.”
The deterrence myth
Proponents of the death penalty have a seductive argument: If would-be criminals know they face execution, they will think twice before committing a crime. This logic seems intuitive. It assumes that the criminal acts with a clear head, rationally weighing consequences. But the flaw is in the premise
At its most serious, violent crime is rarely a calculated decision. It erupts in a moment of rage, in the grip of addiction, in a situation that spiraled out of control in seconds. The person committing the act is not consulting a mental checklist of sentencing guidelines. Punishment severity does not enter the equation.
And the data are unambiguous in this regard. A March 2026 study by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), the most comprehensive of its kind, concluded that decades of accumulated research have produced no credible evidence that executions reduce homicide rates. This is not an advocacy position; it is the near-unanimous finding across academic criminology and criminal justice policy
Likewise, data from the United States on the effectiveness of capital punishment are particularly instructive. Contrary to popular belief, states that apply the death penalty recorded higher murder rates than abolitionist states in every single year between 1990 and 2020. A 2023 study by researcher Stephen Oliphant went even further, finding that three states that suspended executions actually saw homicide rates decline afterward.
The countries that executed the most people in 2024 were China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Yet no serious analyst would describe them as the world’s safest societies.
The deterrence argument does not fail because the theory is badly constructed. It fails because crime is not primarily a rational calculation; it is a symptom of social conditions. Until we treat it as such, no penalty will cure it.
What if we execute an innocent person?
Here is the one question I would ask every supporter of the death penalty, and I ask it not to score a point but because it matters: What if the justice system gets it wrong?
According to Amnesty International, more than 200 people on death row in the United States have been exonerated since 1973; those are people who would have been executed for crimes they did not commit. Executions have been carried out in other cases despite serious doubts about guilt. A landmark 2014 study by the Innocence Project reached a stark conclusion: at least 4% of death sentences are imposed on innocent people.
Four percent. That means for every hundred people executed, at least four are innocent people killed in the name of justice. This is happening in a country with one of the world’s most resourced legal systems, with appeals that can last decades, with DNA testing and an entire infrastructure of post-conviction review. Still, one in twenty-five people on death row is innocent.
Now consider how much greater the risk is in judicial systems that still struggle with evidentiary standards, access to competent legal representation, and the reliability of confessions. A wrongful prison sentence is a grave injustice that can, at least in principle, be remedied. A wrongful execution is final. There is no appeal from the grave.
Every death sentence carries within it the possibility of a state-sanctioned killing of an innocent person. That is not a risk a just society can accept.
The retribution (Qisas) argument in context
A significant portion of the public debate around capital punishment in Morocco invokes the Quranic principle of qisas — retributive justice — citing the verse: “And there is for you in legal retribution [saving of] life, O you of understanding.” (Al-Baqara: 179) This is a sincere and deeply held position, and it deserves a serious response rather than dismissal.
First, qisas in Islamic jurisprudence does not mean automatic execution. It requires rigorous standards of proof deliberately designed to prevent wrongful punishment, and which are barely met by any modern judicial system. Second, Islam elevates forgiveness and compensation (diya) as virtues greater than retribution in many circumstances; therefore, the Quran does not present qisas as the highest moral choice. The very next verse states: “But if one is pardoned by his brother, then there should be a suitable follow-through and payment to him with good conduct.” (Al-Baqara: 178) Third, those who invoke divine law to demand executions should also reckon with how that law is applied in practice.
Countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, most often cited as models of Islamic criminal justice, were among the world’s top five executioners in 2024. Many of those executed were convicted of drug offences and political dissent, not murder. If this is the model being proposed, it demands more scrutiny, not less.
Responding to the selective justice argument
Something revealing emerged in the public reaction to the Tangier case. Many people who supported the death penalty added a sharp qualifier: it should apply to corrupt officials and embezzlers of public funds too, not just the poor and desperate. This reflects a genuine and perceptive awareness of a deep structural problem.
History shows that wherever the death penalty has been applied, its burden falls disproportionately on the most vulnerable: the poor, those with inadequate legal representation, and the socially marginalized. Those with money can afford skilled defense attorneys and rely on networks of influence. Those with nothing face the justice system alone. This means that applying the death penalty in contexts where equality before the law is not guaranteed is categorically more likely to result in a death sentence for the person who can not afford to fight.
The anger driving the call for execution is legitimate. But it is being directed at symptoms while the disease goes untreated.
The roots of crime cannot be cut with a rope
Research indicates that crime in Morocco is fed by an interlocking set of factors, including high youth unemployment, stark social inequality between wealthy and marginalized neighborhoods, inadequate education, and drug addiction. The 2024 Organized Crime Index on Morocco confirms the existence of persistent rural-urban economic disparities, institutional gaps in crime prevention, and a youth population with inadequate pathways out of poverty. None of these excuses violence. All of it explains it.
Tangier is a city that holds obscene wealth along its seafront and crushing poverty in its peripheral neighborhoods separated by a few kilometers and an unbridgeable economic gulf. The young men who for fifty dirhams committed horrifying crimes were not born criminals. They are the product of a system that failed to provide education, employment, or hope, and the grinding humiliation of being made to feel disposable by the society around them.
The death penalty removes criminals. But it does not remove the conditions that produce them. For every person executed, the neighborhood that shaped him remains. The failed school remains. The distressing unemployment rates remain. The drug supply remains. A year later, there will likely be another young man in the same desperate circumstances, and the cycle will probably continue, because we chose the spectacle of punishment over the harder work of prevention.
What actually reduces violent crime? The evidence points consistently to investment in early education, youth employment programs, drug treatment infrastructure, community policing built on trust rather than fear, and a justice system that rehabilitates rather than warehouses. These are not soft options. They are the only options that work. Without these, crime will reproduce itself, generation after generation.
Anger is legitimate. But Justice goes beyond revenge
I understand the anger. I understand the grief of the victim’s family. Every citizen has the right to demand a safe society and strict justice. I am not asking you to minimize what was done or to forgive it on behalf of the victim’s family, who alone have that right. I am asking something harder, that we resist the temptation to respond to a social crisis with a theatrical gesture that will change nothing.
I understand the feeling that the whole system has failed and that the streets are no longer safe. But I cannot accept treating this legitimate anger with a punitive policy that all the research shows does not work, and that may cost innocent people their lives.
Opposing the death penalty is not defending criminals. It is defending a genuine rule of law and a justice system that does not merely seek revenge but protects and rehabilitates. It refuses to accept that the measure of our response to death should be more death.
The death penalty offers the illusion of decisive action. It satisfies the demand that something be done. But recent research and historical evidence clearly suggest that it does not make societies safer, it cannot be undone when it is wrong, and it will be wielded most heavily against those who already have the least.
We owe the victims of crime more than vengeance. We owe them a society that takes their safety seriously enough to address its causes, not one that reaches for the rope and calls it justice.
