Death Penalty - Should it be abolished?

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Death Penalty- Should it be abolished?

In this essay, I will try to answer the above question. I am going to express my view on why I think the death penalty shouldn’t be abolished. I will also express my views on why capital punishment should be re-introduced in the United Kingdom.

Capital punishment is the execution of convicted criminals committing offences regarded so heinous. There are five different ways of execution; lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, hanging and firing squad. The most commonly used methods today are lethal injection and the electric chair. If a person is lethally injected, he is first out to sleep with thiopental sodium and then he is administered with potassium chloride, which will stop his heart. The criminal dies from respiratory and cardiac arrest while he/she is unconscious. As for the electric chair, there is an initial jolt of 2,300 volts, which lasts for 8 seconds, followed b a low-voltage jolt of 1,000 volts, which lasts for 22 seconds and finally a jolt of 2,300 volts for 8 seconds.

Capital punishment deters murder and is not retribution. If the purpose of the death penalty was retribution, then criminals would be executed in the way they murdered their victims. But the purpose of death penalty is not to see how much pain is inflicted upon the criminal but to bring him to justice. Capital punishment deters murderers by inducing the fear of death into he mind of the killer. A person is less likely to do something bad if he knows that harm will come to him. Another way the death penalty deters murder is the fact that once the killer is dead, he won’t be able to kill again. This however, is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder. It is merely an act of bringing cold-blooded murderers to justice.

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There is evidence that the death penalty is increasing in popularity and countries are beginning to find it more useful. A recent study by economist Stephen Layson at the North Carolina University shows that for every execution of a convicted murderer, 18 murders are deterred on an average. The study also showed that raising the number of death sentences by 1% would prevent 105 murders. It is evident by these statistics that the death penalty deters crime.  

Which world would you like to live in? A safe world or a world with lots of crime. Obviously any ...

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