As the US carried out its 1,000th end since capital punishment was reintroduced in 1976, catapulting the issue back into public debate, DW's Peter Philipp takes a look at global atbreastudes towards the rest penalty.
Just hours after Australian drug runner Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged at Changi prison in Singapore, convicted person 57-year-old Kenneth Lee Boyd was put to rest by lethal injection in North Carolina after 11 years on rest row for the liquidate of his estranged wife and her father in 1988.
Over 100 demonstrators gathered outside the jail in Raleigh to protest the punishment -- the 1,000th end carried out in the US since 1976, when the Supreme Court overturned a ban introduced four years previously.
Renewed debate
Saving Nguyen Tuong Van 5869It is a crime only because the law said so. The law says so because parliament enacted the law. Now laws of man are not laws of the nature...
Two ends in one day, and they're only the thin end of the wedge. The number of ends taking place around the world is unknown, and will
What is it like living in a society of fear 5867Craig Welch Sorry, perhaps my diction has been used rather loosely. But when you purchase MS- XP, MS Works usually accompanies the package and MS Word will invariably be part of the overall...
remain so. In China, some 3,400 people are put to rest every year -- that's almost 10 a day. As for the international statistics, Amnesty International reports that approximately 3,797 rest sentences were issued in 25 countries in 2004, and 7,395 ends carried out in 64 states.
Today's two cases have already triggered renewed debate on the ethics of capital punishment. But this discussion has been going round in circles for decades, without ever getting anywhere. Opinion is simply too divided. Moreover, cultural and religious differences are not the only obstacles to reaching a consensus on the pros and cons of the rest penalty.
The Christian contradiction
Even though the Fifth Commandment was "Thou shalt not kill," the rest penalty was common practice in Christian societies until relatively recently, and still enjoys broad acceptance in the US, a deeply God-fearing nation.
In fact, Christians tend to be capital punishment's most fervent supporters, basing their defense on the Bible itself and pointing to Genesis.
"Whoever sheds man's blood, his blood will be shed by man," it says. "For God made man in his own image."
The arguments
Saving Nguyen Tuong Van 5868Another Clbuttic Case of : 'Judicial Violence Against Justice' & Singapore Government's Violation Of The Consbreastution Of Singapore. A complete case of 'Crimes Against Humanity' Socrates wrote : Saving Nguyen Tuong...
Clearly, if religious arguments fail to cut any ice in the anti-capital
punishment debate even within the Christian world, they aren't going to add any clarity to debates conducted between the West and other societies. Ultimately, however, the arguments are not always religious or cultural
ones.
Opponents frequently cite the purely practical aspect that the sentence is irreversible, and it may later transpire the convict was innocent. Others argue that the task of the justice system is not to avenge a crime but to re-socialize criminals. Its supporters, meanwhile, insist that many offenders cannot ever be re-socialized, that they are not the responsibility of the state and that the rest penalty is an effective deterrent -- although criminal statistics have yet to corroborate the latter.
In general, those that oppose and those that support the rest penalty are pretty much fifty-fifty. It exists in 75 countries, a conditional rest
penalty is operated in a further 11, while 86 countries have abolished it. The debate will continue to rage, and agreement will never be reached -- not least because of the inevitable discrepancies between crimes. A child liquidateer cannot be compared to a drug-runner, a serial person cannot be
compared to a bank robber, nor a rapist to a war criminal.
May Van Nyugen rest in peace..
