Sir Richard Branson: It’s time to do away with the death penalty around the world

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Last week, the US state of Tennessee failed in its attempt to execute Christa Pike for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. After changing Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol in 2024 to a single, lethal dose of pentobarbital, a short-acting sedative, the state’s executioners injected two such doses into Ms Pike’s arms. For reasons currently under investigation, this massive drug overdose didn’t kill her.

Nearly two hours into this process, state officials finally called off the execution, rushing her by ambulance to a nearby hospital where doctors did what doctors are trained to do: save her life. Ms Pike’s lawyers have since shared an update on her condition, reporting that she is conscious and speaking after several days in critical condition. It remains to be seen whether the execution attempt has caused lasting damage. If Ms Pike does make a full recovery, the state may likely try to execute her again – even though Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has halted executions for now.

I am not denying the brutal crime Ms Pike committed when she was 18. She confessed to it and has expressed remorse, although I do think that the well-documented sexual, physical and emotional abuse she suffered from her early childhood should have been given much greater consideration in her sentencing phase.

But as a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, my broader point is this: the botched attempt to kill her is just another proof point that the machinery of death still legal in 27 US states (alongside countries like Iran, China, and North Korea) is broken beyond repair.

The red flags have been there for many years. According to the Death Penalty Information Centre, 203 men and women have been released from death row since 1973, in most cases after previously unavailable DNA analysis or new evidence proved their innocence. Many, like Ray Hinton in Alabama, spent decades languishing on death row before winning their freedom. Others, like Richard Glossip, who is facing another trial in Oklahoma to prove his innocence, have come within minutes of being killed, even multiple times. It is widely believed that many have been killed despite credible and reasonable doubts about their guilt – from the outrageous case of 14-year-old George Stinney Jr in South Carolina in 1944 to the terribly flawed prosecution of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas in 1991.

The simple maths – for roughly every eight executions that went ahead, one innocent person has been exonerated – points to a shocking rate of wrongful convictions, with presumably many more we don’t even know about. And now those who are facing their executioners, like Ms Pike, are made to suffer in the most cruel and unusual ways.

In no other area of social and economic life would a rate of error this poor be tolerated. Why is this acceptable for the most irreversible decision a state can make?

It’s not like there aren’t any alternatives to state-sanctioned killing. Prison sentences keep violent criminals off the street, and they do so at a much lower cost than a lengthy capital trial and the necessary appeals that follow. The answer to killing doesn’t have to be more killing, especially when the aim is to show that killing is wrong.

To see the difference, take a look at Europe. All 27 EU member states have abolished the death penalty. Most did it in the decades following the horrors of World War II. Tiny San Marino abolished it as early as 1865. And nowhere did abolition cause mayhem or lawlessness, as proponents of the death penalty in the US would have us believe. When it comes to violent crime, especially homicide, Europe is on average far, far safer than most places in the US. Correspondingly, four of the five US states with the highest murder rates retain the death penalty. The idea that capital punishment somehow serves as a deterrent to crime and makes communities safer has never held up under scrutiny, no matter how often it is repeated.

And as if all that weren’t enough, the death penalty disproportionately targets minorities and the poor. As has been said before, those without the capital get capital punishment. The socio-economic sentencing disparity alone should be reason enough to end the death penalty for good.

Those in favour of the death penalty often argue that reform, not abolition, is the way to go. But how long do you try to reform a system that shows time and again that it is so fundamentally flawed? As human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson wrote in his eye-opening book Just Mercy, the real question is not whether someone deserves to die, but whether societies deserve to kill. Looking at the evidence, the answer is clear to me: it’s time to do away with the death penalty once and for all – in Tennessee, across the US, and in the handful of other countries that still execute people at scale.

Sir Richard Branson is the founder of The Virgin Group

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