Death Penalty: A Yorùbá Response to the Deterrence Argument

Abstract

The most frequently advanced argument for the retention of the death penalty is that it is a more powerful deterrent against crime than any other forms of punishment. This paper seeks to go beyond the simplistic notion that the controversy surrounding the deterrence hypothesis as a basis for public policy on the death penalty can be addressed only scientifically. The paper shows that the traditional Yorùbá society classified crime into two, namely, social and spiritual crimes. While the social crimes can be regarded as non- homicidal crimes like lying, stealing, spiritual crimes include murder, incest, witchcraft, killing sacred animals. The penal content of the spiritual crimes reflects, however, the fact that spiritual realities become manifest in material being. Thus, the paper examines the significance of orí or human destiny in resolving the question of whether the deterrence argument is efficacious or not. Despite the fact that there is an imperceptible consensus among scholars that it is improper to allot a fatalistic interpretation to the Yorùbá concept of orí or destiny, the paper argues that the fatalist approach to orí is much more placatory as a model for explaining why the deterrence argument could not hold in the instances of capital offences like murder, drug trafficking, terrorism, and so on.