Capital Punishment does not act as a Deterrent to Serious Crimes
Capital punishment, as recognizes by the world, is the most severe punishment of criminals, because it directly deprives criminals’ right to life. As a matter of fact, capital punishment deprives criminals’ chance of confession and rehabilitation. Meanwhile, victims also lose the chance of long-term compensation. Therefore, quite a few scholars expressed that capital punishment derived from the primitive barbarous ages of human society, the purpose of punition and revenge was much more than reconstruction for criminal. On the other hand, capital punishment was used as the most powerful governing tool by the ruling class of society. (Death Penalty Debate, Dec 2006) Nowadays, as time progressed and the in-depth knowledge of the law people comprehended, more and more people, even countries think that spiritual modification of the prisoner is more important than punishment. In other words, capital punishment does not act as a deterrent to serious crimes, because it cannot reduce crime effectively and it is not the fundamental solution to solve crimes.
Currently, whether capital punishment deters crime or not is one of the most controversial questions in the world, half of the world has already implemented it. However, with a lot of information people learned for years, there is enough evidence to prove that capital punishment fails to deter crime. On January 21, 2000, Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the U.S stated that “I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent. And I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point.” According to statistics of the murder rates in the U.S in chart 1, the murder rates in non-death Penalty States did not increase. Conversely, it fell faster. Besides that, it was much lower than the rates which states still allow death penalty. In chart 1, it does not matter whether the states...