Does a murderer deserve to live? Ask anybody that question, and chances are high that you get an instant and emphatic no.

Confront them, however, with real life cases of murderers on death row, and the odds take a steep drop in the other direction.

Roger Hood, a criminology professor from Oxford University, asked more than 1,500 Malaysians in a 2013 survey whether they supported capital punishment. A whopping 91% said yes for murder. Between 74% and 83% approved it for drug trafficking or firearms offences.

“But when he confronted them with a variety of scenarios consistent with capital crimes as defined in the statute books, only 1.2% said the culprit should be executed in all cases,” wrote writer Thomas Hubert in an article published by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

The survey, like a previous one Hood conducted in Japan, also shows that popular support for or opposition to the death penalty depends a lot on how the question is asked and on how much information the public has.

Are those results contradictory? Yes. Are they also highly indicative of human nature? Yes. From these results alone, we can make one quick conclusion: it’s easier to pass judgement upon nameless murderers than real people on death row.

The basic reasoning behind the death penalty is simple and biblical: An eye for an eye. If your actions result in the death of others, you deserve death yourself. It’s vengeance at its simplest, an idea so attractive it lies at the centre of two thirds of all action movies, country songs, and cheap paperbacks about cheating spouses.

The argument in favour of the death penalty is more robust than just that, of course. “Justice demands that courts should impose punishment befitting the crime so that the courts reflect public abhorrence of the crime,” read the 2004 judgement on security guard Dhananjoy Chatterjee in Kolkata, India. This reflects a long-held tenet of the pro-death penalty camp, that the threat of death deters future crime.

Research shows otherwise, however. Human rights organisation Amnesty International continually reiterates that no conclusive evidence exists to prove the death penalty’s efficacy over imprisonment in deterring crime. “Crime figures from countries which have banned the death penalty have not risen. In some cases, they have actually gone down,” says Amnesty, citing frequently repeated figures, some of which date back to 1988. An FBI report even shows that murder rates are higher in places where the death penalty is in force.

So if the death penalty doesn’t work to deter crime, why has it stuck around for so long. In a nutshell, people seem to want it or are thought to want it. Removing the death penalty requires political will, and politicians as a rule don’t work for something people don’t want. Besides the constant pressure by human rights NGOs, the only reason why Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Nancy Shukri recently managed to push for the introduction of legislative reforms to review capital punishment is that the issue has once again become hot.

Malaysians were reminded that the death sentence is a terrible thing when a Malaysian, Kho Jabing, was first sentenced to death by a Singaporean court in 2010. Malaysian politicians and human rights activists went into high gear after, appealing to Singapore to stay the execution in favour of the “sanctity of human life”. Then it was pointed out to our government last year that asking another government to desist from putting someone to death is tricky when our country still uses the death penalty.

It’s a little sad how we don’t argue as much for the sanctity of human life when our countrymen aren’t on the chopping block.

There needs to be better recognition of the fact that the death sentence is just the murky embodiment of vengeance. Things change when you put faces to the people you demonise.