Amrit Rathi, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat
ABSTRACT
The practice of capital punishment is an archaic practice that goes against the principle of humanitarian treatment of beings, even if they are convicts. The paper focuses on the reasons coupled with precedents, statistics and anecdotes of different countries so as to prove that why it is of the utmost need to abolish capital punishment through various contentions such as capital punishment failing the objective of deterring people from committing crimes, the death penalty being discriminatory against the poor people hailing from weak socio- economic background. In multiple cases, after the inmate is dead, it has been proved that they were innocent, thus adding to the arbitrary nature of the death penalty. Even though it is awarded to the convicts to give ‘speedy justice’ to the victim, it has been proved as an inordinately lengthy procedure with many factors like delay in execution also proving to be a shortcoming of the death penalty. It costs approximately four times what an average life imprisonment costs, furthermore backing the meaning of the whole idea of convicts living on society’s money even after doing wrong against society. The paper concludes by laying out practices which could be looked upon as a successful replacement to this draconian process.
