Criticism on death penalty
Always more frequently we turn on the television and hear news about people being victims of homicides and massacres. Our immediate reaction is repulsion or pity, but then comes anger and the only thing we can think about is how the criminal should pay for his or her actions. Some governments believe that execution is the only possible form of punishment for such crimes. Besides, in this essay I will argue that death penalty should be abolished in the countries where it is still in force, because it is a cruel practice, a violation of human rights and an ineffective deterrent.
One of the most disturbing aspects of capital punishment is its brutality. In the past it was regarded as the natural consequence for offences such as sodomy, apostasy and witchcraft. During the Middle Ages, the person accused was often tortured to confess, sentenced, processed and then burnt at the stake, according to the auto-da-fe ritual. Famous tools of torture include the breaking wheel and the iron chair. The last one was usually used as a psychological technique: prisoners would declare themselves guilty after watching their companions bleeding to death because of the hundreds sharp spikes. On the contrary, nowadays the executions are less painful, but the agony still remains with methods such as hanging and stoning. In the United States electric chairs and lethal injections are preferred, but the necessary level of unconsciousness not to suffer is not guaranteed. In addition to it, convicts are forced to remain alive until their public execution, held in front of reporters and family members. Another noteworthy point is that capital punishment is the most severe punishment because it is irreversible. Criminals should spend time in prison to rehabilitate and to learn how to be an active member of the society again. However, the whole process does not apply to death sentenced prisoners because they do not get the chance to fully understand their mistakes. Moreover, death sentence is disapproved by many religions, including Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism. Islam and Judaism have mixed opinions about it based upon different time periods. At the present day 102 countries have abolished capital punishment by law and 32 in practice. Unfortunately, death penalty is retained by 58 countries, five of which are the United States, Japan, China, India and Indonesia, where more than sixty percent of the world population lives. Most of them are undeveloped countries with political oppression issues. Besides, death sentence is considered undemocratic by the European Union and it is a mandatory requisite to abolish it for membership.
The debate about death penalty gets even more controversial when it comes to human rights. Some people believe that the retribution of a crime like murder is simply revenge and cannot be condoned. It is seen as the worst violation of the basic right to live, as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Many non-profit, non-governmental organisations fight in order to abolish death penalty. One of the most important is Amnesty International, whose objective is also dealing with women’s, children’s, minorities’ and refugees’ rights so that human dignity is protected. This leads to the fact that the condemned are discriminated in regard to their ethnicity and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A report written by David Baldus and George Woodworth, two main experts of death sentence, shows that black defendants are 3.9 times more likely be sentenced to death, while men are 98% of the people executed since 1976. In addition to these data, more than 4% of the people accused are found innocent eventually. In my opinion, this percentage is too high to justify maintaining this punishment.
Thus, not only capital punishment is wrongful, but it is also clearly inefficient. In fact, retentionist states of the United States spend $23 million dollar per year more than their abolitionist neighbours. Furthermore, there is the problem of prosecutorial misconduct, that occurs in nearly half of the cases, from the moment of arresting a suspect to verbal and physical abuse in jail. What stroke me most was discovering that the crime rate is still very high and people are not discouraged from committing crimes. For example, in 2014 the percent difference between American states that apply death penalty and states that don’t over murder rate was 28%. This means that the fear of capital punishment is not a deterrent and does not fulfil the task of preventing crimes.
All in all, it is clear that death penalty should be abolished because it is brutal, inhuman and inefficient. This essay claimed that capital punishment should be recognised as unconstitutional because it does not solve violence, but it spreads it. In conclusion, life sentence should replace death sentence since it is more advantageous in political, economic and social terms.