What is capital punishment? What is the meaning of capital and what is meant by punishment? Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the execution of a convicted criminal by the state as punishment for crimes known as capital crimes or capital offenses. Historically, the execution of criminals and political opponents was used by nearly all societies—both to punish crime and to suppress political dissent. Among countries around the world, all European (except Belarus) and Latin American (except Guatemala) states, many Pacific Area states (including Australia, New Zealand and Timor Leste), and Canada have abolished capital punishment, while the United States, Guatemala, and most of the Caribbean as well as some democracies in Asia (e.g. Japan and India) and Africa (e.g. Botswana and Zambia) retain it. Among non-democratic countries, the use of the death penalty is common but not universal.

In most places that practice capital punishment today, the death penalty is reserved as punishment for premeditated murder, espionage, treason, or as part of military justice. In some countries, sexual crimes, such as adultery and sodomy, carry the death penalty, as do religious crimes such as apostasy, the formal renunciation of one's religion. In many retentionist countries (countries that use the death penalty), drug trafficking is also a capital offense.

To me capital punishment is just a simple case of pure murder. And why? People opposing the death penalty usually argue that it is inhumane, or even that it constitutes a form of torture. Those who make this argument commonly insist that, in addition to violating the right to life, the death penalty is also contrary to the right to be free from torture or inhumane treatment. This right is included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many other documents.

Some arguments about the humaneness of the death penalty apply only to specific methods of execution. Of methods of execution currently in use the electric chair and the gas chamber are widely seen as producing great pain and suffering in the victim. All U.S. jurisdictions that currently use the gas chamber offer lethal injection as an alternative and in some countries, the same is also true of the electric chair. Lethal injection has become widely used in the United States in an effort to make the death penalty more humane. However there are fears that, because the cocktail of drugs used in many executions paralyzes the victim for a period before ending her or his life, victims may endure suffering not apparent to observers. The suffering caused by a method of execution is also often exacerbated in the case of "botched" executions. Amnesty International has highlighted lethal injection as the most frequently "botched" method of execution, noting practices such as crude "cut-downs" into prisoners' arms when a vein cannot be found. Medical staff, who might have expertise in minimizing suffering, do not normally assist with executions, as this would be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Those who make this argument also insist that the knowledge of one's impending death causes tremendous psychological suffering. This suffering, exacerbated by the long periods often spent by convicts in the United States on death row, have together been described as the death row phenomenon, which is considered by some to be a form of torture.

Not only this, everyone on Earth is fallible. As it goes "To err is human, to forgive is divine". The death penalty is often opposed on the grounds that, because every criminal justice system is fallible, innocent people will inevitably be executed by mistake, and the death penalty is both irreversible and more severe than lesser punishments. The supporters of the death penalty point out that lesser punishments, including life imprisonment, can also be imposed in error and incarceration is also irreversible if the innocent dies in prison. Moreover, whether money is an acceptable compensation for long period of incarceration is a matter of subjective opinion. They also point out that, given significantly large number of people who are incarcerated rather than executed, it is more common for miscarriages of justice to occur in non-death penalty cases, though each individual execution is undoubtedly more severe, except arguably for a case where the innocent were incarcerated for his or her natural life. For supporters of the death penalty, failure for death penalty opponents to oppose life imprisonment (and sometimes incarceration) invalidates their argument.

Opponents of the death penalty often argue that even a single case of an innocent person being executed is unacceptable. Most arguments about wrongful convictions proceed on the basis of empirical evidence and statistics. Opponents of the death penalty in the United States, for example, point to the fact that between 1973 and 2005, 123 people in 25 US states were released from death row when new evidence of their innocence emerged. However, statistics are not necessarily a reliable measure of the actual problem of wrongful convictions. It is possible that many cases of innocent people being executed have gone undiscovered, as once an execution has occurred there is often insufficient motivation and finance to keep a case in the public eye. On the other hand, because in liberal democracies a suspect is considered innocent until proven guilty, the fact that a convict is exonerated and released from death row means merely that there is insufficient evidence to prove their guilt, rather than that they are necessarily innocent.

Some opponents of the death penalty believe that, while it is unacceptable as currently practised, it would be permissible if criminal justice systems could be improved. However more staunch opponents insist that, as far as capital punishment is concerned, criminal justice is irredeemable. The US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, for example, famously wrote that it is futile to "tinker with the machinery of death". In addition to simple human fallibility, there are numerous more specific causes of wrongful convictions; for example:

* Convictions may rely solely on witness statements, which are vulnerable to being countered by forensic evidence. New forensic methods, such as DNA testing, have brought to light previously unavailable evidence and revealed errors in many old convictions, though such technology undoubtedly makes the current conviction more secure and certain.
* Suspects may receive poor legal representation. The ACLU argues that "the quality of legal representation [in the USA] is a better predictor of whether or not someone will be sentenced to death than the facts of the crime".
* Improper procedure may be followed. For example, Amnesty International argues that, in Singapore, "the Misuse of Drugs Act contains a series of presumptions which shift the burden of proof from the prosecution to the accused. This conflicts with the universally guaranteed right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty". This only refers to those caught with drugs

Hence why should we allow a innocent, harmless civilian to be executed so easily without sufficient evidence.

But to every opposing point, there is a supportive point. The death penalty consequences deters potential murders or other serious crimes such as drug trafficking. In the pre-modern period, when authorities had neither the resources nor the inclination to detain criminals, the death penalty or other punishments such as caning or hand decapitation were probably the only available means of prevention and deterrent. The proponents, in turn, argue that life imprisonment does not prevent murder within prison and that life imprisonment is a less effective deterrent than the death penalty.

The question of whether or not the death penalty deters serious crime acts usually revolves around the statistical analysis. Studies have produced disputed results with disputed significance. Some studies have shown a correlation between the death penalty and murder rates- in other words, they show that where the death penalty applies, murder rates are also high. This correlation can be interpreted in either that the death penalty increases murder rates by brutalizing society or that higher murder rates cause the state to retain or reintroduce the death penalty. However, the statistics arguments are misleading because statistics show that correlation does not equal causation and moreover, statistics do not show that life imprisonment or any other individual form of punishment deter murder.

It is difficult to conclusively demonstrate the existence of a deterrence effect. Although the death penalty is not a very strong deterrent to future offenders, it does have an effect on most of them somehow. Even though they need not be executed, and be incarcerated in the prison, it will not only add to the criminal's mental suffering and also wasting taxpayers' hard-earned money. Many supporters of the death sentence argue that life imprisonment is just a substitute only. In fact, this is the result of a sampling problem, where those who do refrain from committing crimes due to deterrent effect of the death penalty or incarceration automatically rule themselves out from the statistics. This means that it is almost impossible to prove the deterrent effect of the death penalty or incarceration by empirical demonstration.

On the whole, i generally oppose to the usage of the capital punishment. It is just pure brutal murder and nothing less.