GP - Capital punishment is unbefitting of a civilised society. Discuss.

Yes, capital punishment is unbefitting of a civilized society.

The death penalty is something that is inhumane and is incongruent with the idea of a civilised society. A civilised society is one that places value on every life and hence the death penalty goes against a core tenet of what makes a civilised society.
1. A civilised society believes that every human life is valuable. Some may argue that human life is so valuable that even the worst murderers should not be deprived of the value of their lives.
2. The value of the offender’s life cannot be destroyed by the offender’s bad conduct – even if they have killed someone.
3. According to Amnesty International, 140 countries have already abolished the death penalty. The most recent one being Latvia in 2012.

The death penalty does not exclude the possibility of executing an innocent man, something that cannot be accepted in a society that is civilised.
1. A civilised society is one that places very high value on having a legal/judicial system that will mete out punishments/sentences that are not only fair but fool-proof. With capital punishment, there is always the fear of executing an innocent due to flaws in the justice system. Witnesses, (where they are part of the process), prosecutors and jurors can all make mistakes. When this is coupled with flaws in the system, it is inevitable that innocent people will be convicted of crimes. Where capital punishment is used, such mistakes cannot be put right As fairness is very much an integral part of a civilized society, it is only right to say that the idea of the death penalty is very much at odds with it.
2. In the USA, 130 people sentenced to death have been found innocent since 1973.

The death penalty can be seen as a form of ‘sanitised’ vengeance and the idea of retribution in itself is wrong and immoral and unbefitting of a society that is civilised.
1. The idea of retribution or vengeance is morally flawed and problematic in concept and practice. The death penalty cannot be used to undo the crime or to carry out justice. It simply takes away another life. The concept of the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ is primitive and even if that was an accepted part of a civilised society, the death penalty can only be meted out for murders and nothing else. The law does not seek to carry out the same actions that the offenders have committed (the law does not take away money from the thief not does it seek to sexually violate a rapist). Hence, the death penalty cannot be used as a form of retribution.
2. Furthermore, the practice of the death penalty in itself is rather cruel and many capital offences do not warrant that kind of physical torture that the criminal would have to go through. This makes the death penalty even more unjustifiable in a civilised society.
3. In July 2014, prisoner Joseph R. Wood was sentenced to death by lethal injection. After the chemicals were injected, Wood repeatedly gasped for one hour and 40 minutes before death was pronounced. A reporter for the Arizona Republic who witnessed the execution, Michael Kiefer, said that he counted 640 gasps from Wood before he finally died.

Capital punishment completely ignores the possibility of rehabilitating the criminal and this goes against the humane belief that everybody possesses the capacity to change.
1. Many crimes that carry the life penalty are committed out of desperation. Sometimes the criminals are coerced or threatened into carrying out the crime and when these offenders are sentenced to death, the law completely discounts the huge possibility that the person can still be a productive, contributing member of society.
2. Angel Mou, a single mother, was only 25 when she was executed in 1995 in Changi Prison. She was convicted for drug trafficking. Given her young age, she could have had the capacity to turn her life around.

However,

A civilised society is one that is low in crime and in order to achieve that, capital punishment may be necessary to serve as an effective deterrent for major crimes.
1. Having a low crime rate is something that characterises a civilised society. However, low crime rates cannot be achieved overnight. The path to civilisation has always been rocky – filled with crimes and violence. So in order to evolve and get out of such a state, societies have always relied on punishments as a way to deter from such crimes happening again, in this case, capital punishment is actual rather complimentary in the making of a civilised society.
2. In Singapore where the death penalty has been as a punishment for several crimes which include drug trafficking and murder, crime rates have been enviably low. The number of capital offences committed has gone down since the 1990s and as of 2011, only 4 such offences were committed.

Being a society that is concerned with the rights of individuals, including prisoners and the families of victims, it is often argued that the death penalty is often argued to be a humane way of affording ‘true justice’ for the victims of the crime.
1. A lifetime sentence in prison is often seen as worse sentence for criminals because of the agony they face whilst serving out their sentences. New inmates are often bullied and tormented – physically and mentally – by other inmates. This is especially true for criminals with offences against children and women. Some of them end up getting murdered by other inmates or they decide to commit suicide. Furthermore, the death penalty provides for the victims or their families a sense of closure and true justice and this is especially true for the families of murder victims. Whilst capital punishment can never undo the harm that was done, it can provide closure for the families, knowing that the guilty person will be unable to harm another person in the future.
2. According to the Ministry of Justice in the UK, murder and suicide rates in prisons have reached their highest levels in years. In 2013, there were 199 deaths in prisons in the UK. Subhan Anwar, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of his partner’s baby, was killed by two inmates in his prison. Another prisoner, Alan Goode, who was in jail for serial voyeurism after spying on women in toilets, was also killed by a former inmate.

GP – Capital punishment is unbefitting of a civilised society. Discuss.