Capital Punishment: Morally correct?

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Since the beginning of civilized societies the death penalty has been practiced and there has been controversy whether it is morally correct, justice served, or just flat wrong. It has been a part of civilization since the beginning of recorded history, but has faced much scrutiny in recent years. A popular anti-capital punishment slogan reads, "We kill people who kill people to show people that killing people is wrong"1. Is there really such irony in capital punishment as the slogan implies? No, there is not. Abolitionists would like for us to believe that kill, execute, and murder are all interchangeable terms, but they are not. Now, let us insert the proper terms into their "slogan" and see what we get: "We execute people who murder people to show people that murdering people is wrong."

Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of ...

Map Capital Punishment in Australia

Title capital punishment

I can see why they would like us to believe that those terms mean the same thing, their "slogan" loses the ground it is standing on. I will show you within this essay how and why capital punishment is both morally correct and a proper form of justice.

To begin we must first understand what capital punishment is, Wikipedia defines capital punishment as, "the infliction of death upon a person by judicial process as a punishment for an offence"2. The term Capital originates from Latin "capitalis"2 literally meaning "regarding the head"2. This is why in ancient times a capital offence was punished by the severing of the head. Now we must also define "morally correct." Wikipedia defines morality as, "a sense of behavioral conduct that differentiates intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good (right) and bad (wrong)"3. I assume we all know that correct is a synonym for...