Arguments of abolitionists and receptionists

Although capital crimes are few as compared with the total crimes committed in our country, they arouse heated value conflicts between those who advocate death penalty as the supreme protection for society and those who see it as making the state a calculated violator of the sanctity of human life.

Elmer Jhonson (1964: 257) holds that the controversy is of great significance because the ultimate question is whether or not punitive ideology will continue to characterise criminal justice system in general.

Arguments about death penalty stir emotions more than the reason. In the last 200 years, arguments have not changed much except one that society has a basic right to kill its citizens, a right given to the state by the citizens. Some Italian and French scholars in the last quarter of the eighteenth century argued that this right was part of the social contract.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

But scholars like Beccaria did not accept it on the basis that since man did not have the right to take his own life, he could not give that right to the state. In the twentieth century also, this argument has been totally rejected. We summarise here important arguments advanced for and against capital punishment.