Should capital punishment be abolished in India?

Answer 1

Arguments against the death penalty.

There are a number of incontrovertible arguments against the death penalty.

The most important one is the virtual certainty that genuinely innocent people will be executed and that there is no possible way of compensating them for this miscarriage of justice. There is also another significant but much less realised danger here. The person convicted of the murder may have actually killed the victim and may even admit having done so but does not agree that the killing was murder. Often the only people who know what really happened are the accused and the deceased. It then comes down to the skill of the prosecution and defence lawyers as to whether there will be a conviction for murder or for manslaughter. It is thus highly probable that people are convicted of murder when they should really have only been convicted of manslaughter. Have a look at the cases of James McNicol and Edith Thompson and see what you think.

A second reason, that is often overlooked, is the hell the innocent family and friends of criminals must also go through in the time leading up to and during the execution and which will often cause them serious trauma for years afterwards. It is often very difficult for people to come to terms with the fact that their loved one could be guilty of a serious crime and no doubt even more difficult to come to terms with their death in this form. However strongly you may support capital punishment, two wrongs do not make one right. One cannot and should not deny the suffering of the victim's family in a murder case but the suffering of the murderer's family is surely valid too.

There must always be the concern that the state can administer the death penalty justly, most countries have a very poor record on this. In America, a prisoner can be on death row for many years (on average 11 years {2004 figure}) awaiting the outcome of numerous appeals and their chances of escaping execution are better if they are wealthy and/or white rather than poor and/or black irrespective of the actual crimes they have committed which may have been largely forgotten by the time the final decision is taken. Although racism is claimed in the administration of the death penalty in America, statistics show that white prisoners are more liable to be sentenced to death on conviction for first degree murder and are also less likely to have their sentences commuted than black defendants.

The alternatives.

What are the realistic alternatives to the death penalty?

Any punishment must be fair, just, adequate and most of all, enforceable. Society still views murder as a particularly heinous crime which should be met with the most severe punishment. Whole life imprisonment could fit the bill for the worst murders with suitable gradations for less awful murders. Some 44 people are serving whole life tariffs in the UK.

I am personally against the mandatory life sentence for murder as it fails, in my view, to distinguish between really dreadful crimes and those crimes which, whilst still homicide, are much more understandable to the rest of us. Therefore, it is clearly necessary to give juries the option of finding the prisoner guilty but in a lower degree of murder, and to give judges the ability to pass sensible, determinate sentences based upon the facts of the crime as presented to the court.

Imprisonment, whilst expensive and largely pointless, except as means of removing criminals from society for a given period, is at least enforceable upon anyone who commits murder (over the age of 10 years). However, it appears to many people to be a soft option and this perception needs to be corrected.

In modern times, we repeatedly see murderers being able to "get off" on the grounds of diminished responsibility and their alleged psychiatric disorders or by using devices such as plea bargaining. This tends to remove peoples' faith in justice which is very dangerous.

Are there any other real, socially acceptable, options for dealing with murderers? One possible solution (that would enrage the civil liberties groups) would be to have everyone's DNA profile data-based at birth (not beyond the wit of modern computer systems), thus making detection of many murders and sex crimes much easier. If this was done and generally accepted as the main plank of evidence against an accused person and a suitable, determinate sentence of imprisonment passed, involving a sensible regime combining both punishment and treatment, it would I am sure, considerably reduce the incidence of the most serious and most feared crimes. The reason for this is that for most people, being caught is a far greater deterrent than some possible, probably misunderstood punishment, e.g. "life imprisonment." Surely this has to be better than the arbitrary taking of the lives of a tiny minority of offenders (as happens in most countries that retain the death penalty) with all the unwanted side effects that this has on their families and on the rest of society. It is clear that certainty of being caught is a very good deterrent - just look at how people observe speed limits when they see signs for speed cameras and yet break the speed limit as soon as the risk is passed.

An astonishing 250 people are added to death row each year and 35 are executed. Capital punishment is the harshest form of conviction. It is a highly controversial issue and is therefore not practiced in all parts of the world. Even South Africa, once notorious for its many executions, has stopped using capital punishment. Putting and end to someone's life is a cruel and unusual form of punishment. The fear of death has proven not to prevent criminals from committing crimes and this "barbaric ritual" should be forbidden in all parts of the world. Another reason to oppose capital punishment is that the reasoning behind it is morally flawed. How can we justify punishing a crime by turning around and committing the same illegal act ourselves? This eye-for-an-eye mentality is not present anywhere else in our law books. If a man is found guilty of rape, he is sentenced to prison, not to be raped himself. Capital punishment is the only case in which the punishment is exactly the same as the crime, which makes the punishers guilty of the same offense they are there to reprimand

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Answer 2

No it should not be obolished as the crimnals will get of lightly, take the case of the Taj Hotel terrorist from Pakistan who is now facing trial in Mumbai, after killing so many people should he go scot free?