Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment In the past, people have invariably felt that if they had been wronged in some way, it was his or her right to take vengeance on the person that had wronged them. This mentality still exists, even today, but in a lesser form because the law has now outlined a person's rights and developed punishments that conform to those rights, yet allow for the retribution for their crime. However, some feel that those laws and punishments are too lax and criminals of today take advantage of them, i.e. organized crime. Knowing very well that the punishments for their crime, whether it is murder, theft, or any other number of criminal activities, will be so negligible that it may be well worth their risk. Although in the past, the number of crimes that were subjected to capital punishment, defined simply as the death penalty for a crime, were outrageous. This leads to the reason that capital punishment should be legal in all states. Amendments were made to reflect the changes in the society's views on the morality of capital punishment. That resulted in the narrowing down of the list of one hundred crimes to twelve, punishable by the death penalty in 1833, and in 1869 it was cut down yet again to just three: treason, rape, and murder because of violent nature of these crimes (Steele). These crimes, even today, are still viewed as violent and should be punished with the highest degree of discipline available to achieve justice. After much public pressure, capital punishment was suspended on a trial run in 1967. This proved to be ineffective, because even though the law stipulated that crime such as treason or the murders of law enforcement agents were still to be subjected to the death penalty. The federal cabinet continued to commute those criminals from death to life sentences, hence the law was not being followed and justice was not being served. This soon was followed with capital punishment's abolishment in 1976, as a formal declaration of what was already happening or rather what was not happening. It is felt that because of this and the fact that there had not been an execution since 1967, that today's current form of punishments are no longer a sufficient deterrent for such serious crimes and have contributed to an ever rising crime rate (Steele). So, this is where the real issue of whether or not capital punishment should exist begins and such a controversial issue could be best understood if we looked at capital punishment in a perspective of how it fulfils or does not fulfil society's ideas of punishment. Is not one of the four fundamental objectives behind punishment retribution? The sentencing objective based on the principle of "an-eye-for-an-eye", which means that what one person has done to another should also be done to that person in return. Is that not justified, especially in cases of premeditated murder of another human begin, another life? Does capital punishment not act as a deterrent? Does it not threaten with an imposition of a