Capital punishment refers to the infliction of death on a person who has broken the law, as a punishment. Capital punishment has existed in the world since ancient times. Legal systems use capital punishment on people for various offences.
With an increase in the use of capital punishment, people started arguing of whether capital punishment the legal system should continue using capital punishment or stop. The two sides bring forward their reasons as to why they support capital punishment or do not support it. Capital punishment involves killing people through either hanging or any other way.People should understand that killing people for the crime they committed does not serve to prevent others from committing the same crime.
Thesis statement I do not support capital punishment because it is against humanity, human rights and forgiveness. It is the cause of family hardships and suffering. This paper explores why people should stop using capital punishment. Discussion Capital punishment goes against humanity. Capital punishment also known as the death penalty uses techniques that undermine humanity.
When undertaking capital punishment, the process involves hanging, firing bullets, slaughter, inducing death through drugs and any other way causes psychological torture and physical pain. Humanity requires that people treat others with dignity they deserve even when they have done mistakes. Capital punishment does not have any form of dignity. The whole process functions more of a revenge rather than punishment. Punishment should offer a corrective measure to the individual who has committed a crime.
It should make the person who committed a crime understand that they did a wrong thing.They have to understand their mistake and take the punishment that works towards changing them so that they do not commit the same offense again. Humanity involves giving people a second chance to do something in a better way. Capital punishment does not offer people a chance to correct their mistakes. Capital punishment involves ending the life of people; it shutters their dreams and does not give them a chance to prove that they did the wrong thing.
Sometimes the court convicts people for the mistakes they did not do just because they could not prove their innocence.It could be fair for people in such circumstances to have a second chance to prove their innocence. Capital punishment does not offer them that chance. Therefore, capital punishment is inhumane in all considerations. Sometimes, people commit crimes mistakenly.
Legal systems become inhumane when they do not offer people in such situations a second chance and decide to end their lives through capital punishment (May, 2005). Capital punishment does not respect human rights. Human rights require that people own a right to life even when they have committed crimes of whatever level.Capital punishment has a single way of handling all people pertained to have committed a crime worth that kind of punishment.
That happens through death irrespective of the way used. It involves killing. Human rights does not support killing. Death should only come from the creator. Human rights require that legal and court systems including the trial process and the people involved in the trial respect life as a quality beyond human control. Therefore, any action that leads to the death of a person violates human rights.
In any sense, capital punishment involves violent actions against humanity that violates human rights.Any person has a right to life irrespective of the offense he or she has committed. For instance, in a case where a person has killed another person intentionally or unintentionally, legal systems should not punish the person with the use of capital punishment because that functions as revenge. Human rights prohibit revenge and any form of killing whether as a punishment or not. Capital punishment involves torture, cruelty, unfairness and sometimes discrimination.
It fails to reduce the possibility of similar crimes happening in the future. All these violate the human rights of individual persons.Besides that, other ways of punishing people exist, such as life sentences. The United Nations commission on human rights observes that the use of capital punishment goes against human rights because it denies a person the right to life by deciding to end the life of a person based on evidence that can be true or false (Rosenthal, Carnegie Council on ethics & Iternational Affairs,2009). Capital punishments cause family hardships and suffering. People who provide basic needs for their families can commit crimes that may call for the use of capital punishment.
Such people provide almost everything for their families. This becomes complicated when persons involves have children and take care of them as single parents. In case these people commit crimes punishable through capital punishment, they leave their dependants in compromising situations. For instance, when a single mother who has children below the age of ten commits crime and becomes convicted then sentenced to death, the children she will leave behind will suffer in several ways.
First, they will lack a person to provide for their basic needs, such as food, clothing and housing.Secondly, they will lack a mother figure in their lives that can take care of their psychological, emotional and comfort needs. These children will remain suffering. Capital punishment torture people mentally and psychologically. People experience a lot of pain when they imagine that their loved ones will die through hanging, slaughter or any other form of capital punishment. This becomes more painful when an innocent person gets a capital punishment sentence for a crime that he or she did not commit.
Sometimes capital punishment does not allow family members to take their dead for burial as heir last respect to them.The court may kill a person and decide to bury the person without the consent of his or her family members. This tortures the family of the victim who has to live with the fact that their loved one died in that manner. Parents, siblings, children, spouses and friends suffer with agony when their friends end p as victims of capital punishment. Capital punishment ends educational life and other essential necessities of the dependants of the person who perishes through capital punishment (Kronenwetter, 2001).
Religious teachings from whichever religions exist in the world advocate for forgiveness.The value systems of different societies in the world advocate for forgiveness when people do mistakes and commit crimes. Human nature involves forgiveness even when societies have no clear guidelines on issues that touch on forgiveness. However, capital punishment works against forgiveness. When people decide to use capital punishment they show clearly that they have not forgiven the person for the wrong he, or she committed.
Forgiveness involves giving people a second chance to do things right and prove their worth. It involves accepting that someone did a mistake but have the opportunity to change what he or she did.Sometimes, forgiveness involves making people understand that they did mistakes and should take punishment so that they do not repeat the mistake again. Forgiving ensures that people do not revenge the actions of other people.
However, capital punishment goes against all viewpoints considered in forgiveness. It does not give people a chance to correct their mistakes because it ends their lives. Capital punishment acts as a form of revenge, something that does not happens once forgiveness takes effect. Capital punishment involves erasing the crime committed together with the person who committed the crime.Therefore, when people decide to use capital punishment they have decided not to forgive the person who committed the crime.
Forgiveness can never work through killing people (Govier, 2002). People could use capital punishment as a way of ending a crime that a person has committed. However, this serves to eliminate the person who committed the crime rather than eliminate the crime or reduce the chances of such crime happening again. In many occasions, people use capital punishment to punish crimes against humanity. However, the use of an inhumane way to solve an inhumane crime cannot offer a solution to the problems that people encounter.Conclusion Capital punishment works against humanity because it involves torture and does not give a person a chance to do things in the right manner.
It works against human rights because it denies individuals their right to life. People violate human rights when they kill other people as a punishment for the wrong they committed. Capital punishment causes suffering in families because it takes away people who perform breadwinning functions for their families. It causes psychological, mental and emotional torture that causes pain for the family of the victim of capital punishment.
Appendices C There are vast differences in the way people view the death penalty. Some oppose it and some agree with it. There have been many studies trying to prove or disprove a point regarding the death penalty. Some have regarded the death penalty as a deterrent, and some have regarded it as state sanctioned murder and not civilized. The death penalty has been attributed to societies for hundreds of years. More recently, as we become more civilized, the death penalty has been questioned to be the right step towards justice.
During the course of this paper I will review the pros and cons of the use of the death penalty as we, Americans, know it. The death penalty is a highly controversial subject. No one knows who’s right or who’s wrong-it’s fifty percent speculation and fifty percent research. It’s just a lot of thoughts and beliefs from people who have contributed to the death penalty hype. Who’s right and who’s wrong? That is the question.
First I need to highlight briefly into to the history of the death penalty to fully understand why people feel the way they do about the death penalty. Almost all nations in the world have had the death sentence and had enforced it in many ways.It was used in most cases to punish those who broke the laws or standards that were expected of them. Some of the historical methods of execution were restricted only by one’s imagination-they include flaying or burying alive, boiling in oil, crushing beneath the wheels of vehicles or the feet of elephants, throwing to wild beasts, forcing combat in the arena, blowing from the mouth of a cannon, impaling, piercing with javelins, starving to death, poisoning, strangling, suffocating, drowning, shooting, beheading, and more recently, electrocuting, using the gas chamber, and giving lethal injection (Silverman 73).
The ancient societies had some pretty brutal methods that were just plainly inhumane. Fortunately, most of the disgraceful practices were largely unknown in Anglo-American tradition. America inherited most of its capital punishment from the United Kingdom or English laws. But not so many generations ago, in both England and America, criminals were occasionally pressed to death, drawn and quartered, and burned at the stake (Isenberg 35).
Had any of these punishments survived the eighteenth century, there is little doubted that public reaction would have forced an end to capital punishment long ago (Isenberg 35).Throughout England, the rotting corpses of executed criminals specked the country, which sent out a warning to all those who dare defy the law, or otherwise acted as a deterrent. Executions were always conducted in public and often became the scene of drunken gatherings to witness the execution. It reminds me of all these horrifying blood-ridden movies we watch today. People are drawn to such spectacles, because they are not getting killed.
Furthermore, death is one of the great unknowns in all of mankind.Crimes of every description against the state, against the person, against property, against public peace were made punishable by death in early English laws (Isenberg 26). It is somewhat curious that any of these horrendous and inhumane methods of execution survived as long as they did, for the English Bill of Rights of 1689 proscribed “cruel and unusual punishments”(Isenberg 27). Which is still in use today in the American Constitution.
Even with fairly relaxed law enforcement after 1800, between two thousand and three thousand persons were sentenced to death each year from 1805 to 1810 (Isenberg 26).Which is a very large amount even by today’s standards. Furthermore, several decisions, later on in history, handed down by the Supreme Court in the post-World War II years have had a significant affect on the effects of both proponents and opponents of capital punishment. They include Louisiana v.
Resweber (1946)- cruelty dealing with humane ways of execution, next was the United States v. Jackson (1967)- the provisions that dealt with kidnapping, next was Witherspoon v. Illinois (1968)- determined excluding juries that had a bias towards death penalties being unconstitutional, and finally McGautha v. California (1971)- juries discretion upon the death penalty and the fourteenth amendment’s “equal protection clause” (Isenberg 23-24).All of these have impacted the nature of the death penalty, as we all know it today in the United States. These have all influenced the way people view the death penalty and help explain why some people oppose it and some impose it.
Another reason pro-death penalty advocates give for their belief is that it serves as retribution, or an eye for an eye.These are the two main types of retribution: revenge, in which the victim gets satisfaction, and “just deserts”, which the offender should have an obligation to repay society (Silverman 44). An eye for an eye relies on what people deserve for their crime, which determines what kind of punishment they will receive (Nathanson 73). Or in other words we should treat people the way they have treated others. If someone murders someone, then they should be murdered.
This type of punishment would not have any prejudice, because they would receive whatever they dished out.It tells us that the punishment is to be identical to the crime (Nathanson 73). Which in a way is a repayment towards the victim’s family, or “just deserts”. This view of the death penalty wouldn’t rely on a jury to decide what should be done to the offender.
Let’s say the offender was black and raped a white woman, and the jury sentenced them to life in prison. People could say in the same circumstances a white man would only get ten years. But using an eye for an eye, both men would be raped in return.
