Capital Punishment is a Necessary Evil | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.

Capital Punishment is a Necessary Evil

Scheme of the Essay

Exposition: The moral argument for the death penalty is invalid.

Rising Action: Many countries are beset with violent crimes.

Climax:

(1) Some say abolish the death penalty because it has not deterred crime. But hard punishment does deter

(2) Some say it is against the norms of civilised society but a cruel person should not get the protection of the civilised people

(3) Criminals are the product of poverty and should be treated leniently; this is ridiculous when applied & murders.

Ending: It is moral bankruptcy if murders are shown leniency.

When judges send murderers and killers to the firing range or the gallows, their action signifies that the courts of law place high value on human life. A society that places the highest value on an innocent man or woman’s life does not let even one convicted killer avoid the death punishment. The moral argument for the death penalty who end the life of an innocent person should be punished likewise-is valid whether ten murders are committed in a year or in ten- thousand years.

Many countries in the world today are beset by violent crimes ranging from simple assault to serial murders. A country can be called civilised only if it is determined to bring down the violent crime figures by imposing the severest punishments (including the death penalty) with ruthless efficiency. India, no surprise, fails this test just as it does in so many other characteristics of a moral nation.

Court judges ought to be moral leaders of a nation; their decisions are moral tutorials to the public. Judges must show again and again that in those huge granite edifices called courts of law morality prevails, that evil doers are punished surely swiftly, and severely. The vast majority of criminal court judges in India are not taking their moral responsibility seriously-at least when they must punish with death. Is there a compelling rationale for treating killers and murderers leniently? A 13-year-old girl who was gang raped by three adults, strangled to death, and the body thrown in the bushes. A fully alive and happy girl on the threshold of womanhood suddenly became a murder statistic. Confronted with killers so loathsome, every intellectual argument for abolishing the death penalty must be torn to shreds. Yet ideological leftists many of them active in the so-called civil rights and human rights organisations oppose capital punishment with all their vocal night.

“Abolish the death penalty because it has never deterred crime,” claim the civil libertarians. But their assertion is an outright lie. In India, as in the USA, the fear of the death punishment does not cripple the murderous intentions of aggressive individuals simply because every killer is not sentenced to die without delay. In the USA, capital punishment is imposed very infrequently and actually carried out even less often. There is always a gap of a decade or more between the act of killing and the death punishment. In India, a death sentence is pronounced and physically imposed even more rarely than in America.

If the civil libertarians are genuinely convinced that would-be killers and murderers are not really affected by the fear of a certain and prompt death upon conviction, they (the Leftists) ought to test their conviction scientifically by demanding that every verified killer be executed and the death punishment be a well-publicised event before a large crowd and televised as well.

Those who just cannot believe that harsh punishments deter crime should visit the Asian countries of China, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and compare the experience with that of just one night out in a large American metropolis. The sceptic of death punishments efficacy must tour Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, and the Gulf states in the Arabian Peninsula as well as spend some time in Moscow and London, Paris and Rome. In the countries where punishments are harsh, indeed “a clear violation of human rights” as the Leftists proclaim, frightening crime is low or virtually non-existent.

But where leftists are powerful and in control- as in the USA- violent crime is a chronic epidemic, dealer than the plague. With almost a mathematical precision, China exterminates its murderers, drug dealers, armed robbers, rapists, women enslavers; Other Asian countries hang their killers and drug smugglers and deal ruthlessly with the other types of societies; religious morally misleading slogan of the Leftist civil libertarians. A murderer or a killer, because he has forcibly (often cruelly) ended the life of a blameless man or woman, loses his worth as an individual. He does not deserve the protection of a civilised society’s humane values because he violated first the most important moral principle of a civilised society. When legislators and judges respect the “norms” and do away with the death penalty, the dread of unnatural death in punishment loses its hold on the violence-prone, and innocent people get killed in big numbers, Is that better? The civil libertarians of the West and East don’t answer that. In putting a violent criminal to death, the state does not become the “moral equal” of the killer, as the human rights activists also claim. The convict kills for selfish and unjustified psychological or material benefit. The courts punish with death to do justice to the slain and preclude others from violent crime. There is no moral equivalence in the state’s and the criminal’s acts of killing. In carrying out a death punishment, the state is not killing an innocent man.

Defending killers and murderers clearly deserving death, the progressive plead that criminals are a product of poverty and should be treated leniently spared the death punishment. Looking at violent crime in countries across the globe, thousands are killed and murdered every year- but ever, very few die because the accused was starving for three days and the victim refused him food. The “Deprived Life” excuse for the lenient treatment of violent criminals is ridiculous because not much mental effort-let alone intellectual sophistication is required to avoid killing another person who has not done anything to you.

When the civil libertarians and the human rights activists run out of pseudo-moral arguments in defence of hardened killers, they rush to the foolish. Abolish the death penalty” they insist, “because executing the murderer doesn’t bring back the dead victim.” Death is inflicted to express society’s profound revulsion towards the murderer and to deter others from murder-the hanging or electrocuting is not a ritual to resurrect the dead man or woman.

It is time to re-energize the fear of the death punishment in the minds of the violent. Every one of India’s criminal court judges must pledge to himself (or herself) to start condemning every convicted killer and murderer to die. It is written in the Indian Penal Code book that anyone caught killing a langur monkey could be jailed for a long as one year. Most killers and murderers in this country are imprisoned for less than a decade. Have the people of India become so morally degenerate as to consider that the life of a healthy and happy man or woman is worth only a tree full of jumping langurs?