The death penalty: Justice denied to individuals wrongly convicted of crime.

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There is a great divide between countries of the world in relation to death sentence as punishment for certain forms of serious crimes.  Death penalty or capital punishment has been abolished in all the developed countries except in the United States of America and Japan.  However, it is still very much enshrined in law in most of the developing countries including China and India.   There is support both for and against the death penalty as a form of punishment for crime which could have an unintended consequence for people wrongly convicted of crime. 

Death sentence can serve as deterrence for future crimes.  The assumption is that human beings have good reasoning ability (rationale) that allows them to calculate the cost and benefits of their potential action.  If they determine that the cost of engaging in a particular criminal activity surpasses the likely benefit from engaging in that activity, they are less likely to engage in the criminality.  However, evidence has shown that most of the violent offenders for whom the death penalty is meant to deter tend to commit criminality under the influence of drugs or alcohol.  They are less concerned therefore about the consequence of their intending behaviour including capital punishment.

Aside from the fact that it cannot serve as a good deterrence for crime, death penalty may also have unintended consequences for innocent people.  There have been instances where new evidence shows that a person who was previously convicted for a crime is not guilty of the crime.  This victim can regain his or her freedom if he or she is still in prison.  If the victim is already out of prison, he or she can claim compensation for the miscarriage of justice from the jailers.  However, the victim cannot have recourse to any of these if he or she was executed following the conviction.  

Clearly there should be other forms of sanctions such as longer prison terms or deprivation of some amount of liberty for violent criminals whilst in prison which could serve as a better form of sanction for criminality than death penalty.

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