Capital Punishment - Agree or Disagree ?

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I'm not quite sure where I stand on it really. I probably don't quite agree with it in this day in age because there has been a history of miscarriages of justice in the UK that led to some innocent people being put to death that what's led to capital punishment being abolished in the 1960s but then at the same time when I hear about criminals like serial killers and maybe nazi war criminals who show no remorse at all for their victims and got executed for it then I don't have sympathy for them. It would be different if they did show remorse. Do you think it would have been fair if the nazis at nuremberg, eichmann, saddam hussein and so on got life sentences instead of being executed ?

I agree with it in theory, but do not agree with solitary confinement or torture. It is more humane to put someone down then torture them(solitary confinement is a form of torture). Torture is worse than death. At least give inmates that option.

To quote Old Testament law: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

To quote W. S. Gilbert: “Let the punishment fit the crime.”

In short, show no mercy.

I'm gonna have to go ahead and slightly agree with it. I don't particularly like the death penalty, but at the same time i see it as an occasional necessary evil.

Sometimes, the truly wicked need to be eliminated.

Actually from the Code of Hammurabi, and was actually a moderating law compared to previous tribal traditions, where the common practice was to respond with excessive violence. Quite literally the opposite of "show no mercy".


As for OT, I understand the impulse to want to eradicate horrible individuals, but I don't think societies should be in the business of killing its Citizens, especially considering the irreversibility of the punishment and the potential for executing innocents.

Concepts such as 'wicked' and 'evil' are characterised, to perhaps put it in overly simple terms, by a lack of empathy, in the same way that darkness is a lack of light. In themselves, they don't really exist. Simon Baron-Cohen (who is surely familiar to many on this forum) has done much work on this subject.