ABSTRACT
As a Moroccan citizen and a practising lawyer, I am very much interested in the debate on the death penalty that is ongoing in my country. I will not dwell here on the arguments for or against the abolition of the death penalty. They all belong to an old and probably interminable debate. That the question of abolishing the death penalty is also a question of principle is very cogently argued by Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle (2008: 350). I would like to state upfront that I oppose the death penalty. Like most abolitionists I oppose it because of its uselessness, its cruelty, its irreversible and irremediable character (especially when it is enforced on innocent people following a miscarriage of justice), its very often discriminatory enforcement on the poor and on minorities and last, but not least, because of the frequent misuse of the death penalty by dictators.
