Points against capital Punishment
- Value of human life
Everyone thinks human life is valuable. Some of those against capital punishment believe that human life is so valuable that even the worst murderers should not be deprived of the value of their lives.
- Right to live
Everyone has an inalienable human right to life, even those who commit murder; sentencing a person to death and executing them violates that right.
- Execution of the innocent
The most common and most cogent argument against capital punishment is that sooner or later, innocent people will get killed, because of mistakes or flaws in the justice system.
- Retribution is wrong
Many people believe that retribution is morally flawed and problematic in concept and practice.
- Vengeance
The main argument that retribution is immoral is that it is just a sanitised form of vengeance. Scenes of howling mobs attacking prison vans containing those accused of murder on their way to and from court, or chanting aggressively outside prisons when an offender is being executed, suggest that vengeance remains a major ingredient in the public popularity of capital punishment.
- Capital punishment is not retribution enough
Some people who believe in the notion of retribution are against capital punishment because they feel the death penalty provides insufficient retribution. They argue that life imprisonment without possibility of parole causes much more suffering to the offender than a painless death after a short period of imprisonment
- Insufficient evidence to prove that capital punishment has been a deterrence and has led to lesser execution of crime. For example number of sexual assault and rape cases have increased after death penalty was incorporated.