HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF DEATH PENALTY

DEATH PENALTY are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The first established
death penalty laws date as far back as the Eighteenth Century B.C. in the Code of King
Hammurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes. The
death penalty was also part of the Fourteenth Century B.C.'s Hittite Code; in the
Seventh Century B.C.'s Draconian Code of Athens, which made death the only
punishment for all crimes; and in the Fifth Century B.C.'s Roman Law of the Twelve
Tablets. Death sentences were carried out by such means as crucifixion, drowning,
beating to death, burning alive, and impalement. In the Tenth Century A.D., hanging
became the usual method of execution in Britain. In the following century, William the
Conqueror would not allow persons to be hanged or otherwise executed for any crime,
except in times of war. This trend would not last, for in the Sixteenth Century, under the
reign of Henry VIII, as many as 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed.
Some common methods of execution at that time were boiling, burning at the stake,
hanging, beheading, and drawing and quartering. Executions were carried out for such
capital offenses as marrying a Jew, not confessing to a crime, and treason. The number
of capital crimes in Britain continued to rise throughout the next two centuries. By the
1700s, 222 crimes were punishable by death in Britain, including stealing, cutting down
a tree, and robbing a rabbit warren. Because of the severity of the death penalty, many
juries would not convict defendants if the offense was not serious. This lead to reforms
of Britain's death penalty. From 1823 to 1837, the death penalty was eliminated for over
100 of the 222 crimes punishable by death. (Randa, 1997). Britain influenced America's
use of the death penalty more than any other country. When European settlers came to
the new world, they brought the practice of capital punishment. The first recorded
execution in the new colonies was that of Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown
colony of Virginia in 1608. Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain. In 1612,
Virginia Governor Sir Thomas Dale enacted the Divine, Moral and Martial Laws, which
provided the death penalty for even minor offenses such as stealing grapes, killing
chickens, and trading with Indians. Laws regarding the death penalty varied from colony
to colony. The Massachusetts Bay Colony held its first execution in 1630, even though
the Capital Laws of New England did not go into effect until years later. The New York
Colony instituted the Duke's Laws of 1665. Under these laws, offenses such as striking
one's mother or father, or denying the "true God," were punishable by death. (Ronda,
1997). Death penalty, has many kind of , the way how will give a death penalty to the
person who will give judge for it. Also, depends in what place it was been judged. The
common way is, Lethal injection that is now the most common form of execution,
although electrocution, gassing, and other methods were used for much of the past
century. The death penalty is usually imposed in homicide cases where the
circumstances of the crime are particularly egregio.

STATISTICAL DATA OF DEATH PENALTY

SOLUTION OF DEATH PENALTY

Many people object about death penalty, they said death penalty is not a solution, for
they believed that, not all who was given this kind judgment is the suspect of such
crimes. There are, indeed, some loose ends. Foremost among them is one of the major
objections to the death penalty I raised at the beginning of this essay -- what about
killing a person who turns out to be innocent? Nothing in my proposal cures that
problem. True, society as a whole would not be doing it, but it could still happen. The
only true cure for this is to abolish death as a punishment entirely and that's not going to
happen soon. Short of complete abolition, the next best thing is to create a disincentive
to executing innocent people, those about whom there is any doubt whatsoever of their
guilt. That disincentive is to make executing an innocent person, even by the person to
whom the criminal's life was awarded, a crime of premeditated murder, with
mechanisms in place to be sure that new evidence of innocence gets presented. This
would assure that such decisions would not be taken lightly. You can have your
revenge, but you'd better be right. Revenge can have its cost, also. There is another
reason. The size and complexity of society today, after the history we have had, has
resulted in too many things being done in a faceless, bureaucratic manner, by people
involved only by virtue of the fact that they are paid a salary for doing them. Individuals
might or might not care about what they do, but that has become incidental to the
machinery of society. It is time to start making things more personal again. There is a
need to put a brake on the growing alienation of people today, to end the feelings that
they are not really involved in society, not really in control in their so-called democracy
that nothing really matters anymore. Even if this kind of justice is barbaric, it would be
no less barbaric than what we have now, and at least it would be a real, human kind of
justice. Today, there is little justice for victims and the survivors of victims; everything is
out of their hands. Nothing, outside of perhaps a rare little bit of monetary
compensation, is ever done for them. In the area of justice, as well as other areas of life
and government, it is all done in the name of society. This must change, and my
proposal is one small step in that direction. It is putting an element of humanity and
control back into the hands of the citizens, where the moral choices of the individual can
matter, even if that moral choice is for revenge.

SOURCES:
Amnesty International, "List of Abolitionist and Retentionist Countries," Report ACT
50/01/99, April 1999
D. Baker: "A Descriptive Profile and Socio-Historical Analysis of Female Executions in
the United States: 1632-1997"; 10(3) Women and Criminal Justice 57 (1999)
W. Schabas "The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law," Cambridge
University Press, second edition, 1997.

CONLUSION OF DEATH PENALTY

There are many conclusion of death penalty. Each of conclusion was organized and
each possible sources of their ideas was implemented depends if it was permitted to be
given. The restoration of the death penalty for serious crimes is an issue of debate in
the UK because of the recent rise in violent crime. The causes, effects and solutions to
the problems of violent crime throw up a number of complex issues which are further
complicated by the way that crime is reported. Newspapers often sensationalize crime
in order to increase circulation and this makes objective discussion more difficult. This
essay will examine this topic firstly by considering the arguments put forward by those in
favor of the death penalty and then by looking at the arguments opposed to the idea.
The main arguments in favor of restoring the death penalty are those of deterrence and
retribution: the theory is that people will be dissuaded from violent crime if they know
they will face the ultimate punishment and that people should face the same treatment
that they gave out to others. Statistics show that when the death penalty was
temporarily withdrawn in Britain between 1965 and 1969 the murder rate increased by
125% (Clark, 2005). However, we need to consider the possibility that other reasons
might have lead to this rise. Amnesty International (1996) claims that it is impossible to
prove that capital punishment is a greater deterrent than being given a life sentence in
prison and that evidence.gives no support to the evidence hypothesis theory. It
seems at best that the deterrence theory is yet to be proven. The concept of retribution
is an interesting one: there is a basic appeal in the simple phrase the punishment
should fit the crime. Calder (2003) neatly summarizes this argument when he says that
killers give up their rights when they kill and that if punishments are too lenient then it
shows that we undervalue the right to live. There are other points too in support of the
death penalty, one of these being cost. It is obviously far cheaper to execute prisoners
promptly rather than feed and house them for years on end. The arguments against the
death penalty are mainly ethical in their nature, that it is basically wrong to kill and that
when the state kills it sends out the wrong message to the rest of the country. Webber
(2005) claims that the death penalty makes people believe that killing people is morally
permissible. This is an interesting argument would you teach children not to hit by
hitting them? Wouldnt this instead show them that hitting was indeed permissible?
There is also the fact that you might execute innocent people. Innocent people can
always be released from prison, but they can never be brought back from the dead.
When people have been killed there is no chance of rehabilitation or criminals trying to
make up for crimes. For this reason capital punishment has been called the bluntest of
blunt instruments (Clark, 2005).