CAPITAL PUNISHMENT – A MENACE TO BE RECTIFIED

  CAPITAL PUNISHMENT – A MENACE TO BE RECTIFIED 





Punishment acts as a tool for inducing deterrence and setting a standard for preventing future crimes. The essence of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology lies in hating the crime and not the criminal. To err is human however, heinous the crime may be. Murdering the criminal under the guise of a ‘heinous crime’ is criminal again as it initiates a never ending chain of crimes. It is like the great game of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Which invariable makes the whole world blind. Neither does it foster deterrence nor garners the sense of justice. It presents the criminal justice system as a mockery – a state machinery meant for state sanctioned murder. 

Here lies the irony. We have constitutional statutes which with social sanctions portray murder as a crime yet the state itself acts as a human slaughtering system for ‘preventing’ future crimes. Anton Chekov quipped “The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to. ”

The State in modern times is a welfare state for which the wellbeing of its citizens is the ulterior motive. So a criminal should be given scope for rehabilitation and a feeling of remorse. If we look into the circumstances behind a crime, we understand that mostly it is out of impulse or a long garnered irrational passion or even an act of psychopathology. None of these circumstances label a person as ‘inherently- evil’. It is the cognition and the perception of the criminal that demands change. Justice is not one that should be awarded at the cost of the life of a person. The state has thus no authority to take lives of any inhabitant. Instead it should foster, through necessary punishment, a feeling of remorse and repentance.

The harshest punishment is when one’s conscience pricks and induces repentence. This is known when Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest says, “The rarer action is in virtue vengeance… they being penitent (repentant).”Moreover assassination by capital punishment is reduces the potential of the State as it is a waste of valuable human resource. The objective of the state is to utilize and channelize human resource in the desired correct direction. Fear psychosis rule is one that belongs to the medieval dark ages where in capital punishment was awarded for crimes in a grotesque manner. In the twenty first century, we live in a society that holds high the anvils of peace, universal fraternity and human rights. We have criminal treatment centres, rehabilitation camps, criminal psychologists, why not utilize them? Is it not ironical and blatant hypocrisy to award death penalty to a criminal when we as a nation are a part of an unending list of human rights enforcement organisations. To punish a crime, should the state also act criminal? 

Taking the life of a criminal doesn’t solve the pestering problem of crime. It only reinforces it. Instead the state should employ measures that would act as a negative reinforcement. It should study the various causes behind the crime and promote awareness and not murder a human being however criminal. Thus, it is important to not see the wood for the trees because it is misleading. 

Stop the crime, Do not kill the criminal ! 

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