Answer: Although many nations have abolished capital punishment, over 60% of the world’s population live in countries where executions take place, such as China, India, the United States and Indonesia, the four most-populous countries in the world. These nations have also consistently voted against the UN General Assembly’s resolutions over death penalty. stently (a) Arguments in favour of capital punishment

• Deterrence: Capital punishment acts as a deterrent to the criminals and potential criminals. Heinous criminal activities such as rape, treason, murder, terrorism, etc. can be drastically reduced when death penalty is practiced. This is the reason why in some countries such as Saudi Arabia capital punishment is still actively practiced.
• Cost implications: Capital punishment cuts down the cost involved in imprisoning criminals because of the fact that the state will have to feed, shelter, clothe, and provide the basic things needed for the prisoners to live in a humane way.
• Eye-for-an-eye approach: To the average person, the severest punishment on the Earth is the death penalty. Justice isn’t really served until the punishment a criminal receives is equivalent to his or her crime.

Arguments against capital punishment

• Sin to kill: Many consider the death penalty as nothing short of a barbaric and an inhumane act, as no matter how severe the crime a person committed, it is still inhumane to punish the person by killing him or her.
• Inhumane approach: Most of the methods used in carrying out the executions are crude and inhumane because the offender has to go through a lot of pain and suffering before eventually dying. Some of these crude methods include shootings, hanging, and stoning.
• There is no scope to review the judgement: The strongest argument against the capital punishment is the fact that there are certain unfortunate instances where people end up being executed for crimes they didn’t commit.
• Violates right to live: The death penalty clearly violates natural right of every human which is the right to live. Every human has the fundamental right to live and not be deliberately killed by an individual or the state.
• Against reformative approach: Some criminals regret their heinous crimes and repent while in prison. They later go on to become model prisoners and advise others against a life of crime. They use their lives as an example to show people that crime doesn’t pay.

(b) Moral implications of capital punishment:

• Retributivist approaches:
  • It serves the principle of equality: As per Immanuel Kant, if a victim suffers the harm of a life ended, the only equivalent harm to be imposed as punishment, then, must be the death of the killer.
  • It serves the principle of proportionality: The amount of punishment merited should be proportional to the seriousness of the offense, more serious offenses being punished more severely than less serious crimes.
  • It accepts the surrender of right to life: As per John Locke, if someone violates another’s right to life, they forfeit their own right to life and can therefore be treated as a being not possessing any right to life at all.
• Consequentialist approach:
  • As per J.S. Mill, capital punishment is the least cruel way (as compared to incapacitation, etc.) in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime.
  • Capital punishment includes bad social effects:
• First, for many the death penalty becomes a spectacle, and for some it evokes pity for the offender rather than the fear of execution needed for effective deterrence of criminal misconduct.
• Second, the cruelty associated with the capital punishment has a brutalisation effect on people watching it.

Vengeance arises out of someone’s hatred, anger, or desires typically aimed at another. There is no internal limit to the severity of that response. Also, the brutalisation impact of a capital punishment over the society is much wider than the deterrence it provides. A civilised society must be based upon humanitarian values, the focus of which should be on reformation and rehabilitation of a criminal rather than following the same path which he/she followed. Therefore, such punishments should either be completely avoided or must be inflicted only by the judiciary in the rarest of rare crimes.