Capital Punishment
Capital PunishmentIn the past, people have invariably felt that if they had
been wronged in some way, it was his or her right to take
vengeance on the person that had wronged them. This mentality
still exists, even today, but in a lesser form because the law
has now outlined a person's rights and developed punishments that
conform to those rights, yet allow for the retribution for their
crime. However, some feel that those laws and punishments are
too lax and criminals of today take advantage of them, ie.
organized crime, knowing very well that the punishments for their
crime, whether it be murder, theft, or any other number of
criminal activities, will be so negligible that it may be well
worth their risk.
Although in the past, the number of crimes that were
subjected to capital punishment, defined simply as the death
penalty for a crime, were outrageous. Amendments were made to
reflect the changes in the society's views on the morality of
capital punishment. That resulted in the narrowing down of the
list of one hundred crimes to twelve, punishable by the death
penalty in 1833, and in 1869 it was cut down yet again to just
three: treason, rape, and murder because of violent nature of
these crimes. These crimes, even today, are still viewed as
violent and should be punished with the highest degree of
discipline available to achieve justice.
After much public pressure, capital punishment was suspended
on a trial run in 1967. This proved to be ineffective, because
even though the law stipulated that crimes such as treason or the
murder of law enforcement agents, were still to be subjected to
the death penalty, the federal cabinet continued to commute those
criminals from death to life sentences, hence the law was not
being followed and justice was not being served. This soon was
followed with capital punishment's abolishment in 1976, as a
formal declaration of what was already happening or rather what
was not happening. It is felt that because of this and the fact
that there has not been an execution since 1967, that today's
current form of punishments are no longer a sufficient deterrent
for such serious crimes and have contributed to a ever rising
crime rate.
So, this is where the real issue of whether or not capital
punishment should exist begins and such a controversial issue
could be best understood if we looked at capital punishment in a
perspective of how it fulfils or does not fulfil society's ideas
of punishment:
Is not one of the four fundamental objectives behind
punishment retribution? The sentencing objective based on
the principle of "an-eye-for-an-eye", which means that what
one person has done to another should also be done to that
person in return. Is that not justified, especially in
cases of premeditated murder of another human begin, another...
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