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Unlike animals, human beings in the course of time have upgraded
their social standards in which they reside and where they can
claim to be proud residents of a protective society, where they
have a prerogative claim to basic civic, political, economic and
legal rights, where state watches and prevails over crime and they
are also the recipients of persistent and unwavering justice,
which being stringent ensures that any slight deviation from time-honoured
and accepted behaviour by any citizen brings them under the
austere eyes of the law which then helps in preserving the fabric
of the society and the efficiency of its social network which de
facto is one core reason why we (should) have capital punishment
as a tool and aid to be used as a deterrent; it has been
universally supported by the great political thinkers like
John
Locke who propounded his concept of capital punishment containing
elements of retributive and utilitarian theory, where he contends
that a person forfeits his rights for the commission of even minor
crimes and once such rights are forfeited, punishments can be
rightly pronounced on them as they have made a breach to the
social contract to which they had agreed and the remedy is
punishment to the wrong doer which in itself is an endeavour to
darn the damage done to the social fabric and by the same raison
d'être capital punishment too is justified for the following
reasons:
(1) from the retributive side, criminals deserve
punishment, and,
(2) from the utilitarian side,
Punishment is
needed to protect our society by deterring crime through such
examples, thus society may punish the criminal in any way it deems
necessary which may include taking away his life so as to set an
example for other would-be criminals and is further justified for
the reason that the acts which are so vile and destructive for
society and dignity of the people
Invalidating the right of the
perpetrator to membership and even to life, because preciousness
of life in a moral community must be so highly honoured that those
who do not honour the lives of others make null and void their own
right to membership, which is why in a community based on love and
ideals when made to face the music of hostility and having to deal
with people who have committed brutal acts of terror, violence and
murder, face a dilemma by the way of the set of ideals the
community propagates; it cannot imbibe the philosophy of "an eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life" but would
be forced to act for the safety of the members of the community
from further destruction and would have to treat the perpetrators
who had shown no respect for life to be restrained, permanently if
necessary, so that they could not further endanger other members
of the community which would leave a sense of satisfaction and
happiness to all with whom the wrong has been done or relatives of
the victims and to society as such, if he who breaks the law is
not punished then he who obeys it is cheated which can also be
rightly corroborated from the utilitarian and retributive
perspective of capital punishment.
For example as per the
utilitarian perspective, capital punishment when pronounced
prevents the criminal from repeating his crime or deters crime by
discouraging would-be offenders and both of these contribute to a
greater balance of happiness in society and according to the
retributive notion of capital punishment criminals deserve
punishment, and punishment should be equal to the harm done and
for determining what counts as "punishment equal to harm,"
theorists further distinguish between two types of retributive
punishment which are lex talionis where retribution involves
punishment in kind and is commonly expressed in the expression "an
eye for an eye", and lex salica, where retribution involves
punishment through compensation, and the harm inflicted can be
repaired by payment or atonement and historically.
so much so that
capital punishment is most often associated with
lex talionis
retribution, with the earliest written statements of capital
punishment from the same perspective dating back to the
18th
century BCE Babylonian Law of Hammurabi which clearly shows
that capital punishment as a deterrent has been in existence from
the time when men were considered to be more clear-headed had a
fear of god and the variances and number of crimes were countable
on the fingers, leaving us to ponder on the issue of the severity
of punishment to which must be added the fact that the severity of
punishment is very crucial for deterrence and can be appreciated
by the statements quoted by criminologist Ernest van den Haag -
A
prompt and certain slap on the wrist, helps little - and
Milwaukee Judge Ralph Adam Fine ,- We keep our hands out of a
flame because it hurt the very first time (not the second, fifth
or 10th time) we touched the fire and it is from this it can be
contemplated why I strongly adhere to the doctrine that a criminal
who has brutally taken somebody’s life has no natural right to his
own life and should be paying with his own life, it is because the
value of a life can only be explained by the people who were
dependant on that life, and as for thinkers who think that
punishment should be more reformative then I contend that capital
punishment is reformative, we are reforming, not the hanged
individual,
But everyone else and by this reformative step
individuals will either be deterred or swerved from the thought
process of killing a human being, which can be characterized as
the ending of a sentence in any literature, only the author has
the privilege to end the sentence, none other is privileged to do,
and for he same rationale, one has the privilege to decides one’s
life and anyone who willingly snatches and disturbs that privilege
loses his own and the state thus by implementing capital
punishment on these unruly people is genuinely making an endeavour
to paint on the canvas of society the importance of ‘one life one
individual has’ and it is valued more than anything else and not
that it is implemented to quench anyone’s draconian thirst and to
sum up and reinforce my argument I quote a piece of folk wisdom
prevalent in the land of Arabia: "Men are not hanged for stealing
horses, but that horses may not be stolen."
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Capital Punishment
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The
author can be reached at:
navodpattali@legalserviceindia.com /
