The Policy of Retaining the Death Penalty in the Reform of Indonesian Criminal Law: An Analysis of the Influencing Factors

The death penalty is one of the most controversial forms of criminal sanction within the criminal justice systems of various countries, including Indonesia. Amid the widespread discourse on abolishing the death penalty in the name of protecting human rights, Indonesia continues to retain the existence of capital punishment, both under the colonial-era Criminal Code (Wetboek van Strafrecht) and under the New Criminal Code enacted through Law Number 1 of 2023. This article aims to identify and analyze the factors that cause the death penalty to still be retained within the national criminal justice system. This study uses the normative legal research method with a statute approach and a conceptual approach, analyzed descriptively and analytically with respect to primary, secondary, and tertiary legal materials. The findings show that the continued retention of the death penalty in Indonesia is influenced by five interrelated factors, namely juridical factors, legal-political factors, philosophical factors, sociological factors, and factors relating to community protection and crime prevention. These five factors show that Indonesia's death-penalty policy is compromistic in character: it continues to retain the death penalty as an instrument of community protection, but with restrictions and mechanisms that are more humane than those found under the former Criminal Code