YES

One’s life is considered invaluable and, hence, capital punishment signifies an exemplary penal action on a person committing the rarest of rare crimes.

It implies exile from the society by snatching the right to life from a person who snatches others’ life or inflicts lifelong pain, suffering & disgrace on other(s). It’s an age-old practice of punishing for perpetrating heinous crimes which leaves a stigma posthumously on the convict’s reputation.

The gravity of the crime mandates that the convict is stopped from wreaking the same havoc on somebody else. There is no better means of ensuring this than capital punishment.

Fear of death should serve as a sufficient deterrent from thinking of committing a deadly crime on others.

Moreover, if the criminal is kept in prison for life, the state would end up being a caretaker of a person who took law into his own hands.

Providing security and provisions to notorious criminals has proven fatally expensive. And, what would they be looking forward to in life?

Given the humiliation they have earned by their misdeeds, there are lesser chances that they would forget their past and resume normal lives after their jail terms. Either their peers or the society would not let them do so. Even if they had a bona fide intention of living a social life, wouldn’t the circumstances facing them compel them to go back to their old business or end their own lives?

NO

A criminal gets carried away by emotions - whether his own or someone else’s - and executes a crime. To him, whatever he does in the heat of the moment is normal and business as usual. Often, after he comes back to senses, he himself feels guilty about it. Capital punishment irreversibly bereaves him of his moral right to restart a normal life. It becomes a judicially assisted murder – another crime to deal with a crime. Particularly in countries such as India where the legal system doesn’t give a person the right to take his or her own life, the grounds on which it can bestow such rights to itself seem rather questionable. Alternatively, even if the intention is to punish the wrongdoer, capital punishment, virtually, accords to the criminal the opportunity of getting away with just a momentary pain for inflicting a lifetime of suffering and disgrace on the victim. And, in today’s world of suicide bombings, even fear of death is not an effective deterrent.

These manipulated minds need care & counselling, not punishment. To add to all this, more often than not, a scapegoat is slaughtered and the real culprit isn’t even caught, thanks to our shabby judicial mechanism. In such cases, though capital punishment weeds out criminals, nailing the masterminds should take precedence to root out crime from society. And the greatest question – what if we kill the wrong man?

(Rishav studies at the Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Tiruchirappalli.)

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