Rising pressure on the Congress to abolish the death penalty has for some time come in the headlines as new groups withdraw support for the proposal and old groups gather more votes in favor of the notion. This battle between the naysayers and the supporters for the death penalty in the United States has raged on for a long time with eminent authorities of the society citing reasons why the death penalty is now an outdated system of justice in any developed country.
The concept behind the death penalty is an eye for an eye or revenge. In older days, executions were primarily done in public to warn other perpetrators that they too would meet their ends in a similar fashion if they continued with their exploits. This is a barbaric way of trying to teach a person that killing is bad. After all, the notion that the death penalty portrays is that it is okay to kill a person who has killed another one. A simple question that activists always raise against the death penalty is whether it brings back the victims? If not then how does taking another life justify everything?
The United States has laws which grant the death sentence to not just murderers but also to drug traffickers and spies. This is an unjust method of comparing various crimes. Each crime is different and should not be treated as the same. Murdering and drug peddling are two different things that should not get the same harsh punishment. Nevertheless, the notion that the death penalty deters future repeats by other offenders is completely bogus as the US hearings have shown. People with a huge history of violence get freed on technicality while innocent people go to jail or worse get hanged!
Where many criminals die under the sentence of the court, a few innocent folks too lose their lives in this manner. How does this system justify the death of the innocent? The world, for the most part, has accepted the fact that the death penalty is an outdated measure to control crime and in many parts of the world, it is either abolished or has been reluctantly refused in court rooms. In India, for example, the Mumbai terror attacks saw the capture of Abdul Kasab, a terrorist personally responsible for the massacre of many innocent lives. Live television recordings show his atrocities and yet the public is divided on whether to hang him or imprison him for life. The law permits a death sentence in India but majority public opinion is against it. Time has come that the US too gets on the bandwagon and bans the death penalty once and for all.