death penalty in malaysia

recently, as a bar member, i got a notice from Bar Council to consider a few motions for the upcoming Bar AGM. one of them is a motion to call for an abolishment of death penalty in malaysia. in short, no more death penalty for murderer, drug trafficker, arms smuggler, war wager etc.

the motion was proposed by some members who were greatly influenced by the current trend in some western countries and by certain resolution in United Nation. according to them, the death penalty would not cause any deterrent to those hardcore criminals and it is simply not proven to reduce the rates of capital crimes. in short, they maintain that those crminals do not deserve to die eventhough they had killed other people or caused untold misery & lifetime trauma to the victims' families.

with a clear conscience, i cannot agree with the absurd motion. my reason are as follows:-

(1) before the death penalty is passed, our High Court has already heard and took into account the accused's intention, action, state of mind, public interest as well as his right to life;
(2) we cannot simply kill people and get away with it, and then maintain that we do not deserve to die. what about the person that we just killed, he or she also did not deserve to die;
(3) the right to life and the right to justice is not one sided right, we cannot be hypocrite and expect different treatment when our life is at stake; and
(4) why the government needs to take care and feed these criminals at our prison at the expense of taxpayers' money. we already spent million of ringgit just to maintain the prison facilities though the money can be used for other good purposes;

maybe its easy for us to judge those criminals when their crimes do not have a direct effect on us. but if our loved one is killed or murdered, we simply want the person who did it to die immediately without any trial. we want no more fair play and no more justice system.

in my opinion, in order to avoid any wrongful conviction on any innocent accused, we cannot simply abolish the death penalty but we need to improve our police investigation style, our criminal procedure law, our law of evidence and our justice system. nowadays, DNA has played a major role in avoiding wrongful conviction to innocent persons.