SHOULD THE DEATH PENALTY BE ABOLISHED?

Should The Death Penalty Be Abolished?

Should The Death Penalty Be Abolished?

Death penalty is the lawful infliction of death as a punishment and since ancient times it has been used for a wide variety of offences. The Bible prescribes death for murder and many other crimes including kidnapping and witchcraft. By 1500 in England, only major felonies carried the death penalty - treason, murder, larceny, burglary, rape, and arson. From 1723, under the “Waltham Black Acts”, Parliament enacted many new capital offences and this led to an increase in the number of people being put to death each year. In the 100 years from 1740 - 1839 there were a total of up to 8753 civilian executions in England & Wales, the peak year was 1785 with 307. “Remember that the population in 1800 was just 9 million. Reform of the death penalty began in Europe by the 1750's and was championed by academics such as the Italian jurist, Cesare Beccaria, the French philosopher, Voltaire, and the English law reformers, Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Romilly.  They argued that the death penalty was needlessly cruel, over-rated as a deterrent and occasionally imposed in fatal error. Along with Quaker leaders and other social reformers, they defended life imprisonment as a more rational alternative. By the 1850's, these reform efforts began to bear fruit. Venezuela (1853) and Portugal (1867) were the first nations to abolish the death penalty altogether. In the United States, Michigan was the first state to abolish it for murder in 1847. Today, it is virtually abolished in all of Western Europe and most of Latin America.” (Benn, 2002, 80)

Is death penalty ethically acceptable?

The state clearly has no absolute right to put its subjects to death although, of course, almost all countries do so in some form or other (but not necessarily by some conventional form of death penalty).  In most countries, it is by arming their police forces and accepting the fact that people will from time to time be shot as a result and therefore at the state's behest. (Moses, 1967, 26)

A majority of a state's subjects may wish to confer the right to put certain classes of criminal to death through referendum or voting in state elections for candidates favouring death penalty. Majority opinion in some democratic countries, including the U.K., is still in favour of the death penalty. It is reasonable to assume that if a majority is in favour of a particular thing in a democracy, their wishes should be seriously considered with equal consideration given to the downside of their views. A fact that is conveniently overlooked by anti-death penalty campaigners is that we are all ultimately going to die. In many cases, we will know of this in advance and suffer great pain and emotional anguish in the process. This is particularly true of those diagnosed as having terminal cancer. “It is apparently acceptable to be "sentenced to death" by one's family doctor without having committed any crime at ...