Capital Punishment 9 Essay, Research Paper

Capital Punishment

Capital punishment should not be reintroduced into Australia or any other country. Capital punishment is a merely another name for legally killing people and no one, not even the State, has the authority to play God. The death penalty is a cruel and unusual punishment and it has been statistically proven that it does not act as a strong deterrent to criminals. There are many reasons why capital punishment should not be re-introduced into Australia or elsewhere.

Firstly I think we should give the convicted a chance to “pay-back” society. Abolitionists believe that the wrongdoer’s should be made to compensate the victim’s family with the offender’s own income from employment or community service. I dare say that the criminal can achieve more alive than dead. By working, the criminal “pays back” society and also their victim or the victim’s family. There is no reason for the criminal to receive any compensation for his work. Money does not play a strong role in jail. One of the most well known examples of the criminal contributing to the improvement of society is the case of Leopold and Loeb. Leopold and Loeb were nineteen years old when they committed “The Crime of the Century.” In 1924 they kidnapped and murdered a fourteen year old boy ” just to see what it was like.” They were both spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Together, they both achieved things such as working at hospitals, teaching illiterates to read, creating a correspondence school, making large important developments in the World War II Malaria Project as well as writing a grammar book. “An inestimable amount of people were directly helped by Leopold and Loeb; both of them making a conscious commitment to atone by serving others.”

Why was capital punishment was stopped in the first place? A strong argument might be because mainly “Capital punishment is a barbaric remnant of an uncivilised society. It is immoral in principle, and unfair and discriminatory in practice. It assures the execution of some innocent people. As a remedy for crime, it has no purpose and no effect.”

What happens if a mistake were made? Would you like to have the blood of an innocent person on your hands? It has been known to happen,” In the last hundred years there have been more that 75 documented cases of wrongful conviction of criminal homicide. The death sentence was carried out in eight of these cases” . How can you be 100% sure that a person is guilty? Of course there are a few causes when the degree of guilt is indisputable. On the other hand, take for example the Lindy Chamberlain case; there was always an element of doubt wether she had killed her own child or the wild dingo’s had. New evidence turned up some year’s later proving Lindy’s innocence. If Australia had the Capital Punishment law, an innocent woman would have been killed. A prisoner discovered to be wrongly accused can be freed; but neither release nor compensation is possible for a corpse.

The death penalty is simply in- humane, un-ethical, and purely in a sense cruel. Two wrongs do not make a right, so how do people believe that killing someone will right all wrong doings? By allowing the death penalty to be re-introduced it is quite simple to see that we do not value human life very highly. Capital punishment is a crime in itself; it is a crime that is executed and blessed by the government. This should leave guilt upon all of our hands if it were ever to be reintroduced, as our democratic society allows the people to have the choice and thus the right to murder.

The right to human life is extremely important, it is valued through-out the global community, hence taking someone’s life, even if this person has committed wrong-doings should not be tolerated or accepted. It is morally wrong for the state in the name of the law deliberately to take life. In a thought it is pre-meditated murder, merely a killing spiked full of revenge, which is in most cases is what is being fed.

The people who have decided to take human life away should be punished with the thought of what they have done for every waking hour of every day for the rest of their lives. They should not be killed. Capital punishment is the “easy” way out for many. They should live to feel remorse and maybe even regret for what they have done. If they are killed how will they ever learn or redeem themselves from their mistakes?

Capital punishment is meant to be painless and quick, a “mercy killing”. This does not always work out though. The methods by which executions are carried out can involve physical torture. “Electrocution has on occasion caused extensive burns and needed more than one application of electric current to kill the condemned”

The cost involved in Capital punishment is severely higher than one might think. It is more expensive for the state to execute a criminal than to imprison him/her for life. Many people opposed to Capital Punishment present, as fact, that the cost of the death penalty is so expensive at least $2 million per case, that we must choose life without parole “LWOP” which costs $1 million for 50 years. Justice for All (JFA) estimates that LWOP cases will cost $1.2 million – $3.6 million more than equivalent death penalty cases.

The argument that is most often used in support of capital punishment is that the threat of execution influences criminal behaviour more effectively than a sentence in jail does. As persuasive as this idea may sound, in reality the death penalty fails as a deterrent for many

reasons. The death penalty will not stop the criminals who expect to escape being caught and arrested. As well it is impossible to imagine how the threat of any punishment could prevent a crime that is not premeditated. Gangland killings, air piracy, drive-by shootings, and kidnapping for ransom are some of the worse crimes that continually committed because the committers think they are too clever to get caught.

Most passion crimes are committed in the heat of the moment. These crimes are committed when the offenders are battling great emotional stress or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. In these cases, violence is inflicted by people who don’t think about the consequences to themselves as well as to others.

In conclusion I believe Capital Punishment should not be re-introduced into Australia or elsewhere. It is immoral, inhumane and it is not an effective deterrent for killers. Human life is precious and I think the fact that it was abolished in the first place speaks for its self. “The law of capital punishment while pretending to support this reverence, does in fact tend to destroy it.”