Capital Punishment Must be Abolished

Capital Punishment Must be Abolished

Evidence suggests that the death penalty does not deter people from

committing crimes. It is a cruel and cold blooded form of punishment and there

have been instances where innocent people were sentenced to death.

The most common methods of execution are hanging and shooting. Countries

like the U.S. use electrocution, gas chambers and lethal injections to dispose

of the convicted. Some countries, like the U.S., have tried to minimise the pain

of execution by introducing the electric chair. In some parts of the world, more

pain is deliberately inflicted on the condemned, such as in the Islamic

countries and Nigeria. In Nigeria the executions are done in public by a firing

squad. The convicted are executed slowly, by firing bullets at intervals,

starting at the ankles. In Islamic countries the condemned are stoned to death.

But there are special rules for these executions; (Amnesty International

article1), "The Islamic Penal Code of Iran stipulates: "In the punishment of

stoning to death, the stones should not be so large that the person dies on

being hit by one or two of them."1 This is the kind of cruelty which is

inflicted on the executed in those countries. Other methods of execution, like

the electric chair and hanging, are also quite cruel to the convicted. That is

one of the reasons the death penalty should be abolished.

Does the death penalty really deter criminals?

There is very little valid evidence to suggest that capital punishment

deters criminals. The most recent study of research findings on the relationship

between the death penalty and homicide rates, conducted for the United Nations

Committee on Crime Prevention and Control, in 1988, has concluded that:"this

research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater

deterrent effect than life imprisonment."1. Many murders are committed under the

influence of alcohol and drugs, some murderers might be mentally ill. If one of

these factors influenced a person, how could he/she control and asses what

he/she is doing or be deterred from committing the crime? It would be impossible,

and after the incident he/she might not remember it. A cover story in the

"Time"3 presents a report about a man called Doug McCray, then 32. He had a

reasonable education after dropping out of college one and a half years later to

enlist in the army. He was given a medical discharge seventeen months later.He

married and went back to college. But his marriage didn't last long and he

dropped out of college again and turned to alcohol. Sometime between October 13