...emotional needs. In this case, the state has the responsibility and the legal authority to punish the criminal or groups of criminals based on the given law. The punishment of the criminals may vary from simple fines and imprisonment to sever torture and the deprivation of life. Capital punishment or the death penalty has existed as part of the human justice system since ancient times. In these earlier periods people were sentenced to death as a punishment for crimes considered as first degree offenses by the state. These crimes were most of the time political as well as religious and the method of execution, in addition to different brutal ways, was mainly beheading. With additional types of crimes resulting in capital punishment and more sophisticated methods of execution, the death penalty has continued to be practiced in the 21st century. However, capital punishment, especially after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, has became an issue of greater debate among states, human right organizations and other nongovernmental organizations. Since 1948, the number of countries employing death penalty is decreasing and currently nearly half of the states in our world have abandoned the death penalty for all kinds of crimes. This paper will focus on presenting the diverging views regarding capital punishment mainly from a human right perspective. The study then tries to present facts, figures, and tries to look in brief the move towards its universal abolition. ...
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...Capital punishment is actively practiced in 58 countries and 35 countries have abolished it de facto. The death penalty has in the past been practiced by most societies as a punishment for murder, political or religious dissidents. Yet, since the 19th century tolerance and respect for life has become of great importance. In this essay I will seek to answer if capital punishment should be reintroduced. Some people say that capital punishment acts as a deterrent. Facing this punishment a murderer may think twice before committing the crime. If one takes somebody’s life he has forfeit his own right to life. However, statistics show that crime rates in countries that practice capital punishment have not gone down. In fact, the United Stated murder rate is 6 times bigger than that of Britain or Australia. Neither country has the death penalty. Texas and Oklahoma have historically executed the most number of inmates who were sentenced to death, though in 2003 their murder rate was higher than the national average. ”I have never heard a murderer say they thought about the death penalty as consequence of their actions prior to committing their crimes” says Gregory Ruff, police lieutenant in Kansas. The life imprisonment, for some anti-death penalty activists, would be the best way to deter crime. On the other hand, assaults in prisons all over the US have more than doubled in the past decade, according to statistics gathered by the Criminal Justice Institute in Middletown, Connecticut...
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... Getting the rightly accused to a just punishment is very important. Some criminals commit a crime because they have no other option to survive, but some do it for fun. I do not advocate death penalty for everybody. A person, who stole bread from a grocery store, definitely does not deserve death penalty. However, a serial killer, who kills people for fun or for his personal gain, definitely deserves death penalty. Death penalty should continue in order to eliminate the garbage of our society. Not everybody deserves to die, but some people definitely do. I support death penalty because of several reasons. Firstly, I believe that death penalty serves as a deterrent and helps in reducing crime. Secondly, it is true that death penalty is irreversible, but it is hard to kill a wrongly convicted person due to the several chances given to the convicted to prove his innocence. Thirdly, death penalty assures safety of the society by eliminating these criminals. Finally, I believe in "lex tallionis" - a life for a life. Deterrence means to punish somebody as an example and to create fear in other people for the punishment. Death penalty is one of those extreme punishments that would create fear in the mind of any sane person. Ernest van den Haag, in his article "On Deterrence and the Death Penalty" mentions, "One abstains from dangerous acts because of vague, inchoate, habitual and, above all, preconscious fears" (193). Everybody fears death, even animals. Most criminals would think...
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...The death penalty has been an inalienable part of human society and its legal system for centuries, regarded as a necessary deterrent to dangerous crimes and a way to liberate the community from dangerous criminals. However, later on this type of punishment came to be regarded as a crime against humanistic ideals by many, and its validity in the legal system has been questioned. Until now, the debate rages on. This resulted in a wide discrepancy of laws on this issue. Some nations including China, the US, Iran, Belarus, and others preserve the death penalty as an option, while others like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and almost all European nations have abolished capital punishment. Still others keep the norm in their legislation’s, but have de facto suspended execution of criminals sentenced to capital punishment. This paper will seek to prove that death penalty has to be preserved as a valid means of prevention serious crimes. It will examine the effect of death penalty on society and its relevance to the protection of interests of common citizens. The history of death penalty is almost as old as the history of mankind. Various means of capital punishment involved burning, hanging, drowning, crucifixion, breaking on the will, boiling to death, electrocution, firing squad, gassing - the list can be continued. The choice of a particular method in Europe in the Middle Age, for instance, depended on the social status of the condemned. Painless and respectable ways were reserved...
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...in the Death Penalty The death penalty is a punishment in which a person is executed for having committed a serious crime. This punishment has been carried out in many different ways all over the world and has been around for many centuries. Since it started here in the United States, however, we have been seeing racial discrimination in sentencing to the death penalty. An African American man who kills a white man is more likely to be sentenced to this punishment than a white man if he kills an African American. African Americans form most of the minority group here in the United States and they are a majority that are falling in this discriminating situation. Being sentenced to the death penalty is an unjust way of punishment for any crime committed, and it is even worse to be sentenced to the death penalty because of the race or class standing of a convict. The race of the convict and the race of the defendant in capital cases are major factors in determining who is sentenced to die in this country. This is ethically wrong. It is choosing to end someone’s life because we do not like their physical appearance or because they cannot afford their way out of it. This is unconstitutional and is definitely not a way to practice for our safety. It is a choice made by a judge that can easily be protected by the law, and that is unfair. We need a system that affords the same fairness to everyone, that does not accept racial discrimination as evidence to sentence to the death penalty...
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...Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Death Penalty I remember watching the movie Dead Man Walking; it was about this man named Matthew Poncelet who allegedly raped a girl and killed a teenage boy. Poncelet pleaded not guilty, but was convicted as a murderer and put on death row. He asked for several appeals stating that Carl Vitello, the man he was with at the time, was the one that should be at fault. Poncelet seems very convincing that it wasn’t him, but at the end, the courts had enough evidence to grant Poncelet the retribution of execution. The movie has me questioning America’s justice system; what if someone was actually innocent? Is it right to kill someone as a consequence for their wrong doing? To some, it seems like the right thing to do. If someone breaks the rules you simply punish them. But how should we carry out these punishments? When eight-year-old Billy steals a candy bar from Seven Eleven, you can bet that one of the parents will deliver some whippings. In Texas, when I was in elementary school, I started a fight, and as a result I got sent to the principal’s office and received three licks with a paddle. So where do we draw the line? At a higher level, what happens to me if I kill someone? Since the beginning of time, societies in almost every culture and background have used capital punishment or physical chastisement as a consequence for the killing of others. But, we shouldn’t be doing this anymore; life is too valuable. Even though some people...
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...Capital Punishment, a very contradictive topic, has significantly received increase support to abolish it. Society considers it to be unethical and barbaric; the attitude portrayed by the abolishers is impractical. Capital Punishment is not meant to for cruelty, it's meant for true justice for the murderers. In an online article, Ten Reasons to Oppose the Death Penalty, one of the ten reasons was that even the guilty have a right to life (Americamagazine.org). When you let a guilty man or woman live while their victim(s) are dead is an injustice for society. When someone takes another person's life there's an unbalance in justice. If we do not fix the balance between good and bad, society will be overcome by the bad, which is the inequality of letting someone who willingly kills someone live. An ethics guide points that the retribution is just a "sanitized from of vengeance" (BBC- Ethics Guide). To this argument I would like to turn the attention to a famous quote, "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." This quote means that getting revenge on someone can cause everyone to end up harmed, and that at the end revenge could only lead to negative effects. The rebuttal would have made a good point if capital punishment was meant for revenge, it is meant to punish those who did unforgivable acts. The criminal is getting punished for his actions like everyone else in society does when the law is broken. Of course there must be proportionality between criminal and...
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...Denied: The Effects Being Ignored Death by lethal injection, death by electrocution, or any form of the death penalty given that people find to be fit for capital crimes is not a human’s right. We as humans do not have the right to end someone’s life based on the fact that they committed a crime. We have to take into accountability the countless amounts of lives that are impacted by this. Even on the international level, there are hundreds of countries who have abolished the death penalty completely. There is more to this than others think, yet they do not take the time to research or study the adverse effects of what this kind of punishment can cause. The death penalty violates the human right to life and causes a ripple effect that destroys the lives of the families of the individuals being executed. Death penalty supporters can be very profound with their opinions on what they believe is an excellent crime deterrent. In an article written for the Journal of Criminal Justice between May and June 2009, one of the authors by the name Shanhe Jiang stated, “Supporters of the death penalty argue that sentencing criminals to death deters others from committing a similar crime in the future.” He states that future crimes could indeed be deterred because of the continued support for the death penalty. In many cases, people see the death penalty as a form to punish those who commit murder, mass murder, rape and any other crime that warrants death. Supporters of this crime deterrent...
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...INDONESIAN; USE A CAPITAL PUNISHMENT FOR ANTI TRAFFICKING CRIME CHAPTER I-INTRODUCTION Background of the Study Indonesia is a source, transit, and destination country for women, children, and men trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. The greatest threat of trafficking facing Indonesian men and women is that posed by conditions of forced labor and debt bondage in more developed Asian countries and the Middle East. The government stopped permitting Indonesian women to travel to Japan and South Korea as “cultural performers,” to curtail a practice that led to victims being trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. However, in 2007 traffickers increasingly used false documents, including passports, to obtain tourist visas for women and girls who are subsequently forced into prostitution in Japan, through the unlawful exploitation of recruitment debts as high as $20,000 each. Trafficking of young girls to Taiwan as brides, mainly from West Kalimantan, persisted. Traffickers use false marriage licenses and other false documentation in order to obtain visas and subsequently force the women and girls into prostitution. Women from the People’s Republic of China, Thailand, and Eastern Europe are trafficked to Indonesia for commercial sexual exploitation, although the numbers are small compared with the number of Indonesians trafficked for this purpose. The Government of Indonesia does not fully comply with the...
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...crimes. I see capital punishment as an immoral practice because capital punishment has failed to prove any benefits. Capital punishment is not cost effective and does not have a deterrence effect. I believe that the influence of media has caused the widespread support for the capital punishment. The public needs to be aware of the reasons why capital punishment cannot be justified. There is a common belief in our society that it is costly to keep a person in prison on a life-sentence. This belief is true—imprisoning a person requires about $20,000 annually. However, studies showed that the cost of capital punishment significantly exceeds the cost of life-long prison terms. When capital punishment is considered, it is mandatory for the case to be heard in the United States Supreme Court. The case goes through multiple appeals and retrials in order to provide “proof beyond reasonable doubt.” By one study, each execution cost $2.16 million more than life imprisonment. Also, the cost of detaining a person on a death-row is higher than detaining those who are serving their terms. This cost mounts to a significant amount considering the fact that an average person on a death row spends close to 8 years in prison. Therefore, it would be wrong to justify capital punishment because of the cost. Deterrence theory is envisioned as people weighing their potential punishments before acting. Many supporters of death penalty argue that by permitting the presence of death penalty in our legal...
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...[Type the company name] [Year] [Type the document title] [Type the document subtitle] alkazar CAPITAL PUNISHMENT Capital punishment, also known as death penalty or execution is a lawful infliction of death upon a person as a punishment for an offense. It has been practiced in the past by most societies, although only 58 nations still practice it, with 95 countries having abolished it. It’s a matter of active controversy in various countries and states. The bible prescribes death for murder and many other crimes, including kidnapping and witchcraft The death penalty has been use in America since 1608. WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO THE DEATH PENALTY Getting capital punishment in any state is not a foregone conclusion in any homicide case. * First the District Attorney has to charge the defendant with first degree murder and seek the death penalty; this is not something they do lightly. * The defendant may offer a plea bargain where he will plead guilty in return for the DA not to have the death penalty, otherwise if the case goes to trial the jury has to find that person guilty in the first degree. * Therefore after the first phase of the trial when a defendant is found guilty in a capital murder case it has to be a second penalty phase where the prosecution can put forward aggravating factors and the defense can show mitigating factors and jurors have to make sure that those factors have been proved and between those jurors. If one of them objects...
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...Death Penalty A matter of one minute could save a life. One living – or rather, dying – example was that of Eduardo Agbayani’s death execution for raping his teenage daughter. In June 25, 1999, the then President Erap Estrada announced the execution of Agbayani at three in the afternoon that day. An article posted in the Cable News Network (CNN) website, a 24-hour American cable channel, stated that at the last minute, Estrada decided to postpone the execution after receiving an appeal from Bishop Teodoro Bacani. He tried calling the prison officials, but only received busy signals and fax tones. Calling from home, Estrada then realized he was not using a direct line specially used for last-minute postponement of execution. When finally connected at 3:12 PM, Agbayani was already pronounced dead at 3:11 PM. It was a difference of a single minute, but in this case, one life has failed to be saved. In a publication released by the Philippine Statistics Authority entitled “Philippines in Figures”, records showed that the over-all reported crimes ballooned from 217,812 in 2012 to 1,161,188 in 2014. At the first half of 2015 alone, the PNP Directorate for Investigation and Detective Management revealed that the total crimes were reported to increase by 46% from 603,085 cases in 2014 to 885,445 cases last year. Thus, the Philippines 2015 Crime and Safety Report identified the country’s crime rating as ‘high’. Such drastic increase in crime rates in the Philippines, especially the...
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...Abolishing the Death Penalty George L Turner III PHI 103 Mr. Russ Tompkins August 31, 2009 Abolishing the Death Penalty The Death Penalty in America today is a highly debated issue and has been for many years. Could you imagine not having a life threatening consequence at all, such as the death penalty when it comes to criminals that commit very severe crimes? There are many people in the United States today with many different opinions on why the Death Penalty should or shouldn’t be abolished in our Country. I’m one who feels that we should not abolish the Death Penalty; however our Capital Punishment system can be much improved. One advantage to keeping the Death Penalty is that it’s suppose to act as a deterrent against those people who might think about committing a serious crime. I believe that it does help as a deterrent for some people, but not to the extent that it should. If we started sentencing more murderers and serious offenders to death, then I believe that more people will fear the consequences in which they may face. Now, if we start convicting the serious criminals to death, then that doesn’t mean continue to let them appeal their sentence and take years before they’re actually put to death. One other thing that I believe that keeps the Death Penalty from being as effective as it should be is T.V. I know it’s only T.V. but that’s what people see and a lot of people believe that is the way it is. Whether or not T.V. is how...
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...Persuasive Essay Capital Punishment, Appropriate or Cruel and Unusual? The roots of Capital Punishment date back as far as the Eighteenth Century B.C in the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon. During this time period there were 25 different crimes that resulted in the death penalty. As time progressed the death penalty became more of a commonplace. Throughout the centuries following King Hammurabi’s reign, the death penalty can be seen in many regions of the world. The death penalty was first seen four centuries after King Hammurabi in the Hittite Code; then in the Seventh Century B.C.'s Draconian Code of Athens, and finally in the Fifth Century B.C.'s Roman Law of the Twelve Tablets. What we would now call cruel and unusual, their methods of execution included crucifixion, drowning, beating to death, burning alive, and impalement. In the Tenth Century A.D punishment by execution became a central law of the land, starting off with 222 crimes punishable by death and then reduced to around a 100. Because America’s origins trace back to Britain our laws were influenced theirs, the death penalty being one of them. This influence of the death penalty on our nation by Britain is where issues arise. Times have changed and so have the people living within them. Where once punishment by death received little to no outcry of wrongful doing, now many believe it is an unjust and horrid act of violence. Those who oppose Capital Punishment tend to argue that taking the life of a...
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...Final: Capital Punishment a just social problem SOC 203 Intro to Social Problems The debate of capital punishment will always generate passion, it is one of the most debated issues in the Criminal Justice system. The absence of capital punishment would prove a greater problem for the sake of society. Many opponents will argue the death penalty should be abolished, they fail to offer up any comparable alternatives for the crime for murder. It is a harsh punishment but, in all fairness, the punishment fits the crime. Capital punishment does what the name suggests: it punishes and it removes the notion that one can kill and get away with it. It serves as a deterrent for those contemplating murder and in the end, it brings justice. Capital punishment defends the sanctity of life and until we evolve to the place where murders are no longer a part of our society, we must punish this crime fairly. To know we have removed a murdering criminal from the street is a relief thankful to deterrence of violent crime, retribution, Christianity, and innocence. One argument for the death penalty is the fact that it deters crime. Those enticed by killing someone might think twice if they know their life will be taken as a consequence. Joanna Shepherd explores the history of capital punishment and explains that while many studies produced mixed results, modern economic studies reveal executions “significantly deter murders” (Shepherd). In addition, Wesley Lowe reports when the death penalty...
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