Eye for an Eye

Capital punishment, at its dark fundamental core, is horrifically flawed, no matter the arguments for its application. The following explores a key point of why penalty of death should never be considered in modern humanist thought.

This history of state murder is violent and horrendous; different methods of death, as carried out legally by the judiciary, involve that of burning, disembowelment, electrocution; it is also abhorrent to contemplate that some are sick enough still to imagine new ways of killing human beings. As recent as 1995, in American magazine, ‘National Review’, nitrogen asphyxiation has been proposed as a new practice. Whether it be less painful or not is beside the point; the result is death. We no longer remain in biblical times, and it is high time we realized that punishment by death has no place in a healthy, functioning society.

Those who believe in a right to life are surely to be against capital punishment. Who can possibly say who has the right to die, and who has the right to live? Of course, this then begs the question: what about the victim’s right to life? The murderer in question has no right, as anyone else, to decide who lives and dies. But are we of the same conscious as a murderer? Or does in fact the legal system have a moral right to decide whether this killer should die?

The legal system is far from perfect; many innocent lives have been executed in the past as a result of mistaken judgment. Unfortunately many who die deserve life, as these blameless should. Can we return life to those that die? Of course not. It follows that we should not be too eager to deal out death in judgment, for the judiciary, who are still only human, cannot help mistakes and miscarriages of justice.

Right at the heart of the practice of capital punishment, lies a horrid contradiction, the clearest example written within the bible, enshrined in the Ten Commandments. The sixth: ‘You shall not kill’, speaks for itself, and takes shape in many different forms, in many different countries, but hails the same point. You must not commit pre-meditated murder. Yet many other of the Ten Commandments have death as a punishment for disobeying it’s teachings. If I was to disobey the first commandment, ‘You shall have no other gods before Me', I face the following punishment:

‘And hath gone and served other gods, and worshiped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heavens, which I have not commanded. Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.’
Old Testament punishment - Deuteronomy 17:1-5

I face death. But surely the sixth commandment prohibits this?

This proves the point explicitly. For the sake of argument let us imagine that pre-meditated murderer’s are to be put to death by capital punishment. Who then kills the murderer? A judge? The person who administers a lethal injection? Whosoever turns on the electric chair? You? Then surely these people also deserve death, for they have also committed pre-meditated murder – they knew their actions were to cause death.

It is a broken backwards system, to which the state becomes the murderer, and society returns to a passed barbaric age. Nobody holds the moral superiority of choice who dies or not, and contradictions lie right at the heart of this vulgar punishment.