Before we discuss about whether capital punishment should or should never be used, we must understand why it was created at the first place, so in this essay, I shall discuss the issue of capital punishment attentively.
We can trace back capital punishments to ancient times, these punishments were invented because the severity of the crime has reached the maximum level and the justice system wasn’t as strict and fair as today, in ancient China, the worst capital punishment is Lingchi, this punishment was commonly given to a person who was deemed guilty of treason, those who were sentenced to this punishment will have their flesh sliced into many pieces until they died of extreme blood loss, one particular case was the execution of the Ming Dynasty general Yuan Zhonghuan, he died after suffering 3000 slices, this was the record number of flesh sliced from a person.
Fast forward to the 20th century, after the end of the second world war, the war criminals were sentenced to death by hanging, some notorious names were Hideki Tojo, then prime minister of Japan under Emperor Hirohito, Amon Goeth and many other members of the SS and army of Nazi Germany. Although the punishments had been carried out, unfortunately the innocent lives that were lost in the war will never return again, and the sadness will forever etched into the minds of the victims and their relatives.
Unfortunately, there were many innocent people who had died from capital punishments because of unfair accusations, and the factors that lead to those deaths are: unlimited authority, racial biases, lack of evidence and limitation of technology. The movie “The Green Mile” which was based from a book of the same name by Stephen King, presented the cruel reality of capital punishment due to racial issues, where the character John Coffey was electrocuted because he was convicted of murder and rape of two children in cold blood because he was seen hugging their corpses and unfortunately strengthen the conviction because he was a black man in the US in the 1930s.
In conclusion, eventhough capital punishments might sound cruel or terrifying, I think it must always be enforced, especially when the crime had caused many deaths and threaten to destroy a society or a civilization, however the sentence can only be carried out once ample evidence has been collected and the criminal was proven guilty, and that the justice system must be completely free of biases and interference from other parties, because the aim of a punishment is not to take lives but to improve lives and bring balance and justice to mankind.