Death penalty eliminates criminals, not crime

" The death penalty is a symptom of culture of violence, not a solution to

it"
In 2017, most noun executions took place in China, Iran, saudi Arabia,
and Pakistan in that order.
In 2008, there was a growing reluctance among those countries
that do retain the death penalty to use it in practice. In 2008, only 25 out
of 59 countries that retain the death penalty carried out executions
according to Amnesty International.

Reasons in favour:
• Retribution
• Very often the persons condemned to death express
rumours and very often experience profound spiritual rehabilitation
• Closer to victim's families
• Prevention of Re-offending

Eliminate criminals, not crime

• Failure of deterrence
• Retributive justice and not reformative justice.
• Brutalizing society (disturbed individuals may be angered
and they more likely to commit Murder)
 • It is discriminatory- weight is disproportionately carried by
those with less advantaged socio- economic backgrounds or
belonging to a racial ethnic or religious minority.
• Can be used as a political tool (punish political opponents
Ex: Iran or sudan)
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in India
• 2007, India voted against United Nations General
Assembly resolution calling for Moratorium on the death penalty. In
2012, India again I felt it stance.
• 2015- the Law Commission of India submitted a report to
the government which recommended the abolition of capital
punishment for all crimes in India, accepting the crime of waging War
against nation or terrorism related offences .
Conclusion:
Crimes are as much about social failure as they are about individual
responsibility. Arguments on deterrence assume that crimes are
individual problems, imagined and carried out by reasons of an
individual will. It assumes that fear will trump the massive influence of
everything else in our lives
As a society we find ourselves in a strange bind- on the one hand
sucking more violent and harsher punishments for certain crimes and at
the sometime smuggling with rampant impurity for certain others.
Justice is not served in either situation.
To tweak martin Luther king’s words, words, the arc of the moral
universe must bend towards a more empathetic version of justice rather
than a retributive one.

Ethical and Procedural concerns:

1-retributive not reformative
2-inhuman and ineffective.
 backlog- justice delayed
3-subjective and arbitrary.
Pardoning- president and governor - judicial review.
4-public outrage and media trail
5-miscarriage of justice.
US judiciary- specific time
Indian Legal system

Malaysian government decides to abolish capital punishment

Context: The Malaysian Cabinet has decided to abolish the death penalty
for all crimes and halt all pending executions. The government has taken
the decision to scrap capital punishment followingstrong domestic
opposition to the practice.

Why is it being abolished?

Activists contended that the death penalty is barbarous, unimaginably cruel

and pointless, as it has never been proven to deter serious crimes. They
say, once the sentence is scrapped, Malaysia will have the moral authority
to fight for the lives of Malaysians facing death sentences abroad.

Background:

Capital punishment is currently mandatory in Malaysia for a wide range of

crimes including murder, drug trafficking, treason, kidnapping, possession
of firearms and acts of terror. The sentence is carried out in the nation by
hanging, a legacy which has lived on since the British colonial rule.

Can capital punishment reduce crime rates?

Statistics have not been able to prove or disprove the efficacy of capital
punishment as a deterrent. While the U.K. has seen an increase in murders
since 1965 when capital punishment for murder was removed from the
statute book, Canada has not seen any such impact since it abolished the
death penalty in 1976. The underlying socio-economic conditions in a
society that cause crimes seem to have as much of an impact on the
increase or decrease of crimes as the law does.

Need of the hour:

It is not the severity of the punishment but the certainty and uniformity of
it which will reduce crime. Even for capital punishment to work as a
deterrent, the fairness of the investigation, the certainty of conviction, and
the speed of the trial are vital. With the police and judicial independence
being under a cloud, especially after the incidents in Kathua and Unnao,
the deterrent value of capital punishment seems diminished unless police
reforms and fast-track courts are a part of the package.

India votes against UNGA draft resolution on use

of death penalty

Context: India has voted against a United Nations

General Assembly draft resolution on the use of
death penalty, saying it goes against the statutory law of
the country where an execution is carried out in the “rarest
of rare” cases.

UN Against Death Penalty:

• The draft resolution, taken up in the Third

Committee (Social, Humanitarian, Cultural) of the
 General Assembly was approved with a recorded vote
of 123 in favour, 36 against and 30 abstentions.
• The draft aimed to ensure that it is not
applied on the basis of discriminatory laws or as a
result of discriminatory or arbitrary application of the
law.
• The resolution sought to promote a
moratorium on executions with the aim of abolishing
death penalty.
• India was among the countries that voted
against the resolution, which would have the
Assembly call on all States to respect international
standards on the rights of those facing death penalty.

India’s views:

India has voted against the resolution as a whole, as it goes

against statutory law in India. The death penalty is
exercised in ‘rarest of rare’ cases, where the crime
committed is so heinous that it shocks the conscience of
the society.

Indian law provides for all requisite procedural

safeguards, including the right to a fair trial by an
independent Court, presumption of innocence, the
minimum guarantees for defence, and the right to review
by a higher court.