Justice that fits the crime

Begin with the verse the platform has set as the standard for this row, and then let the difficulty of it do the work. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man his blood will be shed; for in His own image God has made mankind” (Genesis 9:6). It is the only place in the Bible where God legislates on the death penalty, and He legislates it in the context of a flood that had just destroyed the world, and He grounds it in the image of God rather than in the grief of the survivors. It is not a soft verse. It is a hard one, and the platform puts it at the head of this row because a Christian position on capital punishment that runs only on softer ground than Scripture has not yet met the question.

But the second verse on this row is the one that makes the difference, and it is the reason Micah 6:8 sits beside Genesis 9:6 rather than after it. “He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the LORD require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. Genesis 9:6 supplies the first clause and, if left alone, will swallow the other two. The whole discipline of this row is holding the two together: a penalty proportionate to the crime, and a standard of mercy that governs how the penalty is carried out and who it is carried out upon. Deuteronomy 19:21 is the shape of the justice: “You must show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” And Romans 13:4 is the warrant for the state to wield it at all: “he does not carry the sword in vain. He is God’s servant, an agent of retribution to the wrongdoer.”

Now the honesty. This platform has never claimed that a capital sentence is a soft position, and it will not pretend otherwise in order to be comfortable. It has also never claimed that the question is settled in Scripture, because it is not: the Bible legislates retribution in Genesis 9:6 and Deuteronomy 19:21, and it legislates the strongest possible case for the sanctity of the offender’s life in a passage this platform must not hide. “because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23) — and Paul quotes it of the Cross. A Christian who argues for the death penalty is therefore not arguing that God is indifferent to the sanctity of human life, because Deuteronomy 21:23 says He is not. He is arguing something narrower and harder: that the sanctity of human life is a reason the penalty must fit the crime exactly, and that a state which cannot protect the lives of its citizens has no business claiming the moral authority to spare the lives of those who took them.

And here is the part that ought to make every Christian in this country uncomfortable, because it is not about theology at all. South Africa does not have a death penalty. Not a suspended one, not a moratorium, not one awaiting review — the provision was declared invalid as inconsistent with the Constitution in June 1995 and repealed from the statute book in 1998. The framing of the debate is therefore not “should we keep or abolish the death penalty.” It is: what is the state going to do about the people who are murdering women and children, and who in this country is going to have the courage to say it?

The scale of what is being asked of the parties contesting your municipality on 4 November is not small. 50,111 cases of gender-based violence were registered with the police in the last financial year, of which 30,736 resulted in arrests or referrals — which means that 19,375 cases ended in neither an arrest nor a prosecution. The bodies of nine women killed in similar circumstances have been found across Ekurhuleni since mid-July, the first five in Kempton Park and the rest within 35 kilometres of it. And the research is unambiguous that 3 women are killed by intimate partners every day in this country. In the 3 months to March 2026 the number of murders fell by nine and a half per cent — and while the President has announced a 90-day plan on street lighting, forensic backlogs, municipal safety audits and liquor, and has called for life imprisonment with no bail and no parole for the perpetrators of rape and other grave crimes, the demand for the death penalty is being pressed by the ANC Women’s League and by Parliament rather than by the President himself. In Parliament, the National Council of Provinces debated gender-based violence in October, and as the debate has gone on the calls for the death penalty have grown louder. Civil society organisations have been picketing the Western Cape legislature demanding it. And at least one of the major parties has argued the case against this row in print: in its 2026 manifesto, in the section on safer communities, it states that “research has shown that the surest deterrent to crime is not the severity of punishment, but the certainty of it” — a line that cuts against the position this row is advocating, and which a voter has a right to know about.

And here is the thing that ought to worry everyone who is squeamish about this row. The route back is not ordinary legislation. The Constitution is silent on the death penalty, which is precisely why the courts were left to decide it; and the 1995 court decided it against the penalty by reading the rights to life and to dignity, in Chapter 2, as incompatible with it. So a government cannot simply re-enact a hanging statute and be done with it — the statute would be read down again by the same courts, on the same reasoning, unless the Constitution itself is changed. Changing section 1 of the Constitution requires a Bill passed by the National Assembly with the support of at least seventy-five per cent of its members — three hundred of the four hundred — and by the National Council of Provinces with the support of at least six provinces. And the same 1995 judgment that struck the penalty down said, in terms, that the constitutionality of capital punishment cannot be put to a referendum, because the whole point of establishing a constitutional order is to protect the rights of minorities and others who cannot protect their rights adequately through the democratic process. Which means that the “just have a referendum” position is not a shortcut around the Constitution. It is a way of losing it.

And that is the honest case for this row. A party cannot promise the death penalty and deliver it by passing a law. It has to go back to the Constitution and get three hundred of the four hundred members of the National Assembly, and six provinces, to agree to put the death sentence back into the founding document of the country. That is what “a party that will table the amendment” actually means, and it is why the question is worth asking at all.

So the honest test for 4 November is not a tick. A tick is a sentiment. The test is whether the party will table the amendment — into its own manifesto, on the record, and into Parliament as a private member’s Bill — or whether it will manage the issue by saying nothing. Silence on this row is not neutrality; it is the position of every party that has declined to take the question on since 1998, and the cost of that silence is paid in a police docket and in a morgue. “Pursue justice, and justice alone, so that you may live” (Deuteronomy 16:20) is not a sentence that tolerates an unanswered question about the punishment for murder.

Which brings the hardest part, and the platform will not flinch from it. Deuteronomy 21:23 says that the one who is hanged is cursed by God, and Paul applies that to Jesus. A Christian who supports the death penalty is standing in a long line, but not a comfortable one, and the honest believer knows that the Cross is God’s own judgement on the very thing the platform is arguing to retain in human hands. This row has to be held with a steady hand, because a position argued with cruelty will not persuade anyone who has not already been persuaded, and a position argued with hypocrisy will not persuade anyone at all. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). Whoever does not love the family of the murdered, and the woman whose body was found, has not understood the verse they are quoting. “Learn to do right; seek justice and correct the oppressor” (Isaiah 1:17) — both halves, and the second half is what stops this row from being about the state and makes it about the victims.

And the place to take all of it is the same place this platform has taken everything else: the ballot. Not a rally, not a petition to the Speaker, not a hashtag. A vote, in a polling booth, on 4 November, for a party that has a written position on the punishment for the worst murders and has the honesty to put it in its manifesto where you can read it before you decide. “Seek out the LORD and His strength; seek His face always” (1 Chronicles 16:11). And when you have read it: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the LORD of Hosts” (Zechariah 4:6) is a word for Zerubbabel, who was building the temple of a nation that had just come home from exile, and it applies to a government in the same way. The authority to wield the sword is entrusted, not seized, and the power behind it is not the state’s own. A government that claims the right to take a life is claiming something it has been given, which is exactly why it must be answerable for what it does with it — and why a people has the right to ask, out loud, what it will do.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The same murders, the same silence, the same parties, the same question nobody will answer. On 4 November, you can break the cycle. Vote for the party that will say what it intends to do.

Mark the tick if this analysis holds. And in the comments: if you are against the death penalty, what is your alternative, and will you put it in a sentence as concrete as “we will table the section 1 amendment”?