Capital Punishment, the road to a corrupt criminal justice system, must be abolished for the sake of society. The death penalty is unfair towards society members, such as tax payers, innocent people, and the criminal as well.

Capital Punishment:

The Road to Corrupt Criminal Justice

11/16/09

College Preparation Period 3

Capital punishment, or the death penalty, is the planned death by the state of one who has committed a capital crime. One who is sentenced to death is sent to death row, a term that refers to a section of a prison that houses convicts that await execution. Standard forms of modern-day execution are electrocution, hanging, gas chamber, lethal injection, and firing squad. Some of the earliest forms of execution took place during the Babylonian Empire under the rule of King Hammurabi. He took punishment as a serious manner, and he established what appeared to be the first laws, known as the Code of Hammurabi, that allowed for punishment by death. "An eye for an eye" is a phrase that appears in the Bible, and it literally means that if one has injured the eye of another, then that person must give his own eye in compensation. The key principle behind this law is to provide equal compensation to one who has been offended, even if it means death. Although this was a while back, the theory behind it still remains today, and in some cases, it is stretched to certain extremes. The death penalty may be an effective way to compensate for a loss to society, but is it morally right? Mahatma Gandhi once said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." The death penalty is an atrocious method to use because of the risks to society, its exceedingly high costs, and its cruelty against human rights; it must be abolished and replaced with alternative methods. Things have changed since the instatement of the first death penalty laws; more severe crimes have taken place, that has a direct impact on the safety of...