Ethical Reasoning Final, Essay Example

Death penalty, capital punishment, or execution is lawful process of killing a person by the state as a punishment for the crime committed. Crimes that legally attract death penalty are referred to us capital offence or capital crimes. Capital punishment has been practiced for along time by most societies. Many countries in the world have abolished death penalty substituting with life sentence. Only 58 nations are still using death penalty as a legal form of punishment. Political ideologies and religion perspectives have generated a lot of controversies over execution of human life just because of the crime committed and as away of having justice.

Life is sacred and the society has no rights whatsoever to terminate another life as this diminishes the sanctity and dignity of human life. When done with premeditation by a state in the name of law, it does so in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner (Bae, 2007). Justice can never be achieved by killing or terminating another life. Death penalty does not give the offender any chance to change but a subject to cruelty of human beings.

I am convinced to hold a very strong opinion to the effect that, death penalty is unconstitutional as it an unusual punishment and the process of law need to have equal protection. There is no enough evidence to indicate as to why a murderer has also to be killed. States which are still practicing death penalty, crime rate have reduced significantly. Instead, if a person is aware that he is going to killed because of what he had done, more chances are that the person may commit suicide. But if the penalty is not there, the person may have room to view life from another perspective, ask why the offence was committed and try to develop mechanism to change and have an opportunity to teach the wider society to avoid doing the same.

Human life is so valuable that even the worst murderers or violent robber cannot be subjected to take away their lives. In many cases, mistakes or flaws are made in the justice system and this may result to the killing many innocent people where death penalty is used. Retribution is morally flawed and problematic both in practice and idea. The state cannot teach that killing wrong by killing (U.S. Catholic Conference). Taking life when life has been lost is a revenge and not justice.

The capital punishment does not deter people from committing capital crimes. It is a harsh punishment to the individual but not harsh to the crime. From the Amnesty International report, 1996, research failed to proof that execution was significant than life imprisonment. Statistics indicate that the death penalty results to high rate in murder and leads the society to brutalism.

Those in support of death penalty argue that it is a fallacy that death penalty costs more life without parole. They emphasizes their argument that justice cannot be thought in financial terms. Thomas Aquinas, a theologist argues that a dangerous man in the society is commended for execution in order to preserve the common good. To kill a person who retains the natural worthiness is intrinsically evils, but it may be justifiable to execute a sinner just as it is to kill a beast (Anckar, 2004). An evil person is worse and harmful than a beast. Therefore, he ought not to live.

References

Anckar, C., (2004). Determinants of the Death Penalty. N Y: Routledge.

Bae, S, (2007). When the State No Longer Kills. Albany: State University of N Y Press.