Does capital punishment really deter serious crimes?
No, I don’t believe it does. A civilised country does not execute human beings. Murdering the murderer can’t be justified. They have to be removed from society so as not to inflict more pain and death but when we as human beings become the same and justify it then we are no better than the criminal. Thank God Canada does not have the death penalty and doesn’t rely on the skill of the lawyers to determine who lives and who dies. ————- And there is this grim statistic “Of the 598 executions carried out in the whole of the USA from 1977 to the end of 1999, Texas accounts for 199 or 33%.” “Among the major nations of the Western world, the United States is singular in still having the death penalty. After a fiveyear moratorium, from 1972 to 1977, capital punishment was reinstated in the United States courts. The death penalty is the bluntest of “blunt instruments,” it removes the individual’s humanity and with it any chance of rehabilitation and their giving something back to societ
It certainly deters the individual who is executed, but I remain unconvinced of its effectiveness in most circumstances. Yes, I am anti-capital punishment. I haven’t written this to win any brownie points, either. I believe that if the death penalty was an effective deterrent, it would no longer be needed. People have been executed for all sorts of crimes and non-crimes for as long as records have been kept. It is not a deterrent in the historical sense: new generations of humans are not learning from past experience that their actions could lead to their execution. There are some people who will always operate outside the bounds of society. Their numbers are reinforced continuously by those who wish to reinvent the wheel for their own gratification. These people are not likely to be deterred, since they so obviously consider themselves invulnerable. These folks are those who are liable to spend the remainder of their days in prison or who are executed. There are those who are prone to
Not particularly. A major argument against the theory would be that the Retentionist USA has the highest murder rate in the industrialised world, and rates are highest in Southern States where most executions occur. According to human rights organisation Amnesty International: “Recent crime figures from abolitionist countries fail to show that abolition has harmful effects. In Canada, for example, the homicide rate per 100,000 population fell from a peak of 3.09 in 1975, the year before the abolition of the death penalty for murder, to 2.41 in 1980, and since then it has declined further. In 2003, 27 years after abolition, the homicide rate was 1.73 per 100,000 population, 44 per cent lower than in 1975 and the lowest rate in three decades.” See www.amnesty.org for plenty of resources on this (Admittedly they have been collected with a view to supporting an abolitionist point of view, but most come from independent sources). However, it is interesting to note that the murder rate has i
