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Although the death penalty has been withdrawn it still exists in some states in the USA and is used in other countries across the globe. Is death a suitable punishment, or does it reduce civilization to the status of murderers?
The dilemma of whether the death penalty is ethical is a major issue that society has been facing for centuries. Currently, capital punishment more commonly known as the death penalty is used in 53 countries around the world to deprive someone of their life because they are believed to have committed crimes deemed by society and the governments as deserving the infliction of death. This essay will discuss how the death penalty should not be considered a suitable punishment and on the contrary how the law and society should condemn and abolish it as a means of punishment as there is no official evidence that killing individuals contributes to less wrongdoing or deters crime.
The death penalty has been used to punish the guilty for centuries. It is the act of executing someone for a particular wrongdoing. It is the harshest of all disciplines as there is no point of return, death is definitive. Supportive and counter considerations against the ‘moral side’ of the death penalty have been the center of debates for a long time. Although individuals who advocate the necessity of the death penalty consider the positive effects of the execution, they fail to acknowledge that capital punishment does not guide society to good morals; on the contrary, it infringes our Human Rights Act and punishes innocent individuals to an unfair and painful death without having given them the second chance that everyone deserves.
On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed the ‘Human Rights Bill.’ ‘No one shall be tortured or subjected to cruel, inhumane, or humiliating treatment or punishment,’ declares Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Epstein, 2014). The death penalty is barbaric and a terrible punishment for the entire human race. We preach non-violence, but we put it into action in our daily lives. Execution is an inhumane method of putting an end to a human life. The death penalty does not discourage future killings. Most intellectual criminological groups oppose the idea that the death sentence deters murder, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (The Death Penalty Information Centre, 2021). Fear of the death penalty has an insignificant effect on murderers.
An outraged person’s ‘argument’ usually leads to a murder. ‘I think I’m going to kill today,’ a normal person does not say. (DPI, 2021) People never consider the possibility of being executed if they murder someone. People still kill, and the number of murders in the United States and elsewhere in the world where people are being executed has not diminished.
Advocates of the death penalty support the idea that the fear of capital punishment would eventually diminish the killer instinct of the individual and that the dread of the execution would be a hindrance. The main weakness of this theory is that despite, what is expected, the contrary is achieved, as the individual knows that even if they get arrested the end is predefined so with that mindset, nothing will stop them from going extensively further, to do substantially more evil.
Another point of view of the supporters of the death penalty is that in society there must be some form of retribution for heavy crimes, a relief for those who are left behind, a lesson that should be taught. It is projected as the hand of law, or even worse as the way the law decides that an ‘eye for an eye’ should be applied in the case of someone who has committed a heinous crime and that what is owed to the families of the victims is to take their revenge by even allowing them to be the spectators in the execution. In this case, the state itself does not differentiate between the criminals as it chooses to commit the same crime by taking someone’s life without, however, the state having to bear the consequences of its actions. The key problem with this behavior is that the death of the criminal will not bring the lives of the victims back. On the contrary, it leads society to wrongdoing and reinforces the idea that you sow what you seed which is utterly wrong. One would argue if the death of the criminal will bring psychological peace to the relatives of the victims, if that would occur surely it would have a temporary duration, as in reality, no sane person would be happy watching someone else die. There have been cases where this temporary feeling of justice was soon transformed into guilt and regret because a person who has been saved and reintegrated into society was never given this chance. When an attempt is made to implement the policy, we should consider the examples of individuals who have come out to express their regret when shortly after the execution of the criminal, and the short satisfaction of watching him die, the family felt that this action had little or no impact on society and that they wish they had not supported the idea of the person being executed, like the case of the Hall Family in the state of Missouri in the United States.
After losing their daughter who was murdered by Jeff Ferguson, her father announced that ‘his family has come to deeply regret Ferguson’s execution.’ Death opens a vicious circle of pain and sadness that another death will not manage to heal or bring to closure. Instead, the people left behind will always have to carry it with them until they die.
More recently, research has also concluded that other factors predetermine if an individual will be sentenced to death, and the findings are contradictory. Race, gender, and social class of the victims and the offenders are potentially decisive factors when the decision is taken upon the punishment of the offender. For instance, women individuals are treated more leniently than men, as judges tend to empathize with them, being in a more vulnerable state than male offenders. Furthermore, in previous research, judges themselves have confirmed the preferential treatment of female offenders by the court (Johnson, 2003; Nagel
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