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Should Capital Punishment Be Banned

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Whether the death penalty should be banned for all crimes punishable by law or it ought to exist for certain felonies has been a highly controversial issue since the beginning of the 18th century AD with the rise of the abolitionist movement, the latter being strongly influenced by the enlightenment era and especially the works of Montesquieu and Voltaire. Yet, according to historic evidence, capital penalty as a punishment imposed by a state dates back to the 18th B.C, when King Hammurabi established it for 25 crimes in Babylon. We can also notice that the death penalty was enforced in many of the World’s greatest and most influential empires, such as the Roman Empire. However, as it was mentioned above, no one dared to question the …show more content…

If a potential offender realizes the fact that he will be sentenced to death, should he commit any hideous crime such as rape or premeditated murder, chances are that the instinct of survival that exists in every human will kick in; this combined with the fear of him being executed will deter him from actually committing such crime. One of the main concrete evidence to support this opinion was presented by Isaac Ehrlich in 1973. Using his innovative analysis, the results indicated that for every criminal executed, seven lives were saved because other to-be criminals were deterred from committing homicide. To make sure his results were undoubtedly correct, Ehrlich did follow-up studies, only to reconfirm his conclusions once more. Another objection raised by the opposition regarding this topic is that capital punishment will safeguard society. Many people in today’s society firmly believe that a criminal who has expressed violent behavior before, is more than likely to do such a thing again. Furthermore, they often argue that in the same way robbers are sentenced to jail in order to make sure that they will not commit the same crime at least for they time of their sentence, murderers should be punished with death, both for the reasons aforementioned and due to the fact that they will not be able to harm anybody else, in or out of prison. Finally, those opposed to the banning of capital punishment are of the opinion that by executing one that has committed a heinous crime will neither bring back the person murdered nor cure the one who was physically and emotionally scarred for life but it will undoubtedly provide a sense of justice to those who suffered as a consequence of the

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