Cause and effect: Capital punishment - Essay Example

Client’s Information (English 1A) Capital Punishment The attitude towards the death penalty as a punishment includes methods of execution and it can be an important indicator of the level of social and cultural development of a country. The death penalty as a criminal punishment serves as legal restriction, legal deterrent to criminals. As noted by psychologists and lawyers, fear of death can restrain some criminals, but for others it will be ineffective. The main cause of supporters of the capital punishment is "education by fear", but it is impossible to prove that fear can be a deterrent factor.

Most often murders perform under the influence of alcohol or drugs, in a state of panic, in the state of excitement in which emotions take precedence over reason. “Then there are the ‘acts of passion’ or of ‘temporary insanity’, where heinous crimes are committed in a totally ‘unthinking’ state e.g. honour killings” (Bhonsle 1). Some of the violent offenders are persons that are completely unbalanced or mentally ill. In all these cases, the fear of death can not play the role of a deterrent factor.

Under the assertions of this kind is impossible to draw an empirical basis because there will be a representative sample of people willing to admit that the fear of punishment did not allow them to break the law. When a person plotting a crime in his mind prevails over the fear of punishment and hope of impunity. Although every person has inherent sense of self-preservation, which prompts him to stay out of trouble, hardship and death, but the feeling did not suppress it other inclinations. People carefully planning serious crimes can, despite the risk to decide on them in the hope that they will not be detected.

In such cases, the main deterrent factor is the probability of detection, arrest and conviction. The death penalty may even play a negative role in the fight against crime, distracting officials and the public of the measures that really need to be taken in order to obtain real results. As numerous studies have confirmed that the death penalty reduces crime, as well as by the existence of methodological difficulties inherent in all such works should not be an hypothesis about the deterrent effect of the death penalty as a basis for ignoring public opinion on this issue.

An important effect of the death penalty is a punishment of innocent people, an unacceptably high risk of a miscarriage of justice and the likelihood of an innocent person to death. So, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, for 24 years - from 1973 to 1997 - an annual average of 2.5 sentenced to death were released from it, as it turned out that they were unjustly convicted (Dieter 1997). Jurisprudence knows many cases when innocent people have been sentenced to death. In such cases, the death penalty cuts off the possibility of judicial error corrections.

Our society is brought up on ideology, allowing justifying justifying the right and power to execute the legislator. This right is enshrined in criminal law. And today we will have the misconception that without the stiffness of crime can not cope. We must admit that we still live in a society with inverted legal concepts that are formulated in the past decades. Works CitedBhonsle, Minnu. “Death penalty: Does it serve the purpose?.” Complete Wellbeing, 2014. Web. Assessed on April 28, 2014.

Dieter, Richard. “Innocence and the Death Penalty: The Increasing Danger of Executing the Innocent.” Death Penalty Information Center, 1997. Web. Assessed on April 28, 2014.