One of the most important problems of justice and law is the attitude toward a death penalty. But what is capital punishment? Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia reads:
“Capital punishment, also referred to as the death penalty, is the execution (killing) of a person by the state as punishment for a crime. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences.
The term capital origins from Latin capitalis, literally “regarding the head” (Latin caput).
Today governments, the legislative authorities make a decision about abolition of death penalty, not relying on public opinion, but based on general civilization and religious principles. So the government faces a dilemma. From one side, it is accepted to take into account public opinion at acceptance of important decisions in democratic countries. From the other side, the reputation of the country suffers in other countries’ opinion.
Capital punishment stimulates criminality sufficiently, as some people can reason: if the state can kill me, why can not I murder someone else. So one of the integral signs of the democratic constitutional state is humaneness.
Humaneness is the realization of human life value.
Speaking about capital punishment different arguments and reasons should be mentioned. For example, it is obvious that judicial errors can not be corrected; execution can not restore the situation that existed before a crime and by the way death penalty does not influence the amount of the committed grave crimes and does not stop criminals. But at the same time capital punishment does not give a criminal a chance to correct the errors and realize, analyze the situation. The state has no right to take criminals’ lives and moreover it is the demonstration of force in the hands of weak state power which can not warn and stop criminality by other facilities. Death penalty sets an example of cruelty for people and at the same time assists in committing a crime. Cruel punishment kindles rough instincts, based on extreme neglect of human personality. So, execution is a murder for the sake of a murder and that is why it is inhuman from point of moral and religious principles.
Different religions of the world choose equivocal and doubtful position concerning capital punishment. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia cites:
“Some, such as Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church, teach
that while the death penalty is hypothetically permissible
in certain circumstances, it should be abolished in the
modern world. In the past, some religions sentenced men to
death either for failing to convert to their religion or
for converting to another. According to Islamic religious
law, a Muslim can be sentenced to death for conversion to
Christianity.”
But in general for believers murder is not justified by the forced defensive sin. It is impossible to say that death penalty is the forced self-defense of the society from a criminal. There are another ways to be protected from such people. So, death penalty means is a murder, not justified in the eyes of God, I.e. a sin. We can also say that murder of a killer is not murder of a man, meaning that a killer is a not man. But we are still people. It means that we firstly need to be foremost thoughtful about that, how to save human in ourselves. The state must be with human person colors! Especially that state does not give life, and it cannot take it away”¦