I agree with the statement to a large extent.
The death penalty, also known as capital punishment, is the execution of a convicted criminal by the state as punishment for crimes known as capital crimes or capital offences. A crime is considered a capital crime once it threatens national security. Some examples of capital crimes are first degree murder, drug trafficking, terrorist activities and treason. The United States, Japan, Singapore and South Korea are the only developed countries that practise capital punishment.
I believe that the death penalty should be abolished due to various reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, two wrongs do not make a right. It is not justifiable to take a felon’s life just because he caused harm to others, because that does not solve anything. No one has the right to take the life of another fellow human being even if he is a sinner, because we are imperfect ourselves.
In addition, there might be irreversibility in miscarriages of justice. As what Voltaire, the French philosopher from the seventeenth century said, “It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one”. There have been cases whereby innocent people were sentenced to death, even in recent years. This kind of error totally disgusts me because its people’s precious lives that we are talking about here! An execution of an innocent person is an injustice that can never be rectified.
Moreover, surprisingly, it has been proven that capital punishment does not deter crime. According to scientific studies, executions are not any more effective in preventing people from committing crimes than long prison sentences. Interestingly, I have also read that states without the death penalty have much lower murder rates. Apparently, studies have shown that the South accounts for 80% of executions in the United States, but yet it has the highest regional murder rate.
Finally, the death row can take years before it is carried out and it actually costs far more to execute a person than to imprison him for life. Not forgetting, this heavy cost is actually borne by taxpayers. It does not make sense to get the working population to literally pay for the criminal’s crime.
However, the death penalty also has its purposes. Crimes like murder would only be taken seriously if the penalty for committing the crime is equally as serious. Without a severe punishment like the death penalty, a severe crime would fail to seem as severe. Edward Irving Koch, United States representative from 1969 to 1977 and the Mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989, once said, “It is by exacting the highest penalty for the taking of human life that we affirm the highest value of human life."
In my opinion, rehabilitation is a much better alternative to the death penalty. We should put in the effort to restore a criminal to a useful life, one that they contribute to themselves and to society, through education or therapy. Allow them to realise and make up for all their wrong doings. Punish them by making them suffer from feelings of guilt rather than subjecting them to cruel forms of execution.
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