Capital Punishment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Capital Punishment - Essay Example In some occasions, crimes such as rape, incest, sodomy as well as adultery were punished through death penalty. In a country like china, high level corruption, human trafficking as well as drug trafficking are punishable by death (Cullen, Bartkowski and Unnever 317). There is no doubt that use of capital punishment was used by a variety of society as a process of enhancing justice. At present a total of 58 countries still use capital punishment while about 97 states have done away with it for whatever crime, 8 countries have abolished it for specific common crimes while about 10 countries have not used death penalty on the last 10 years. It is worth mentioning that approximately 90.0% of death penalty occurs in Asia. In the United States of America, the history of death penalty has centred on the two views of the same issue. One side holds the view that death penalty is necessary in the society to bring sanity while the other side believes that an advanced and civilized society like the US should not resort to using death penalty as a way of punishment since it is a cruel way of instilling sanity in the society. It is important to note that over the years, advocates for improvement in the way capital punishment is done has resulted a in a number of changes. For instances, through passage of laws which are in line with the constitution, some states have abolished capital punishments. However, others have embarked on strategies aimed at changing the techniques utilized when executing offenders, critically examining the types of crimes that warrant death penalty as well as developing plans to identify factors that lead to crime. Ideally, capital punishment in the US has its root in the primitive British laws. It has been argued by proponents of capital punishment that the approach helps the society tremendously reduce crime. This paper seek to present arguments for and against capital punishment and make a judgment whether the approach is good in deterring people from committing crime or not. Arguments for capital punishment Eliminating future dangerousness It has been argued by proponents of capital punishment that executing individual who have committed serious crimes such as killing, others, stealing, raping, treason among others will eliminate that individual and the society will live with no fear of being raped, killed among others. This school of thought can be traced to moral theory of John Mills. In this theory, the guiding principle is that the best option to be taken is the one that generates greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. To that effect, if majority of the citizen will live comfortably when a few thieves, rapists, corrupt individuals, drug traffickers are eliminated so be it. Berry, in his article published in 2010 stated that the rationale for punishing someone based on their dangerousness is that the state needs to protect its citizens from the threat that the offender poses to society. In other words, the state chooses to incapacitate an offender in order to ensure that the offender does not commit another criminal act (Berry, 894). From the beginning of the post-Furman era, most states have included and relied on an evaluation of an individual‘s dangerousness to contribute to the determination whether a criminal offender should be put to death. Texas and