Death Penalty
A death penalty is also called capital punishment or execution. It is the punishment for a criminal who has committed a serious crime. Over 100 countries has abolished the death penalty, but there are still some countries who consistently execute high numbers of prisoners. These countries are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Malaysia. Also, these countries have poor human right, unlike most European countries.
Amnesty International opposes death penalty and they said it is cruel, inhuman and degrading. If you want more information, you can look up their website and they have published statistics of yearly executions by countries.
I do not oppose death penalty myself and I will tell you my opinion. I believed that there should be a death penalty for a serious crime, and it should be used for criminals who has two or more counts of murder. The reason I said more than two is if there is doubt – you know sometimes prisoners are wrongly accused.
It is far too common; our police and our justice system have often got it wrong. Plenty of innocence people go to jail for the crime they did not commit.
These criminals who can kill others without remorse should not be allowed to live. Also giving them life sentence and keeping them in prison is a waste of taxpayer’s money. The money can be used to help poor people or to build hospitals.
Recently, Indonesia has executed two Australian men who were drug smugglers by firing squad – Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Many Australians are very upset. Some are even thinking about boycotting Indonesia.
I believed the president of Indonesia, Mr Joko Widodo is just trying to make a political statement. Since Australia has been giving Indonesia a lot of pressure to stop the execution. Mr Widodo just want to tell us, “we’ve our own law and we don’t submit to any outside pressure.” It is a very childish behaviour, it will not do Indonesia any good and it will give themselves a bad name internationally.
Indonesia has upset a few countries. It is sort of like growing up, you have to give up death penalty – to show others that your country is civilize. It has been proven, death penalty cannot solve drug trafficking in any country.
Death penalty for drug trafficking is unfair.
In my own opinion death penalty for drug trafficking is unfair. Drug smugglers don’t deserve death penalty. It is not as serious a crime as murder.
Why I think it is unfair?
The first reason is drug doesn’t kill people, unlike murder. For murder, the person being killed has no choice. The murderer will not ask the victim if he wants to be killed or not. It is different when buying drug, you are asked and you agreed to it. Also, drugs will not kill you when you take it. You can always quit – only it is a little bit hard to kick the habit – with determination, it can be done. So as many other obsessions in life, eating, drinking, computer games, gambling and exercising, etc. These habits are hard to rid of as well.
For the same argument, many other people should be executed for their crimes. Like people who produce wine, cigarettes, games, casinos and so on.
Death penalty for murder is fair – a life for a life. For other crimes, there should not be a death penalty. If you think drug trafficking is bad, what about some crooks who cheat millions of dollars out of people. In many cases, hundreds and thousands of people lost their life saving – you can imagine the devastation to the families who lost all their money and who has to live on the street. These criminals are far worse than drug smugglers. Also, though people who committed a war crime and killing innocent people.
Instead of using the death penalty to stop drug smuggling, there are many other ways. One of the most effective ways is education; you educate kids so they don’t take drugs. When there are no buyers, there will be no sellers. No one can sell drugs to me because I don’t take drugs. Also, you can have programs which could help the drug addicts. There are many new medicine and prescriptions to help addicts to quit.
People take drug mostly because of social problems, like job lose, broken families and poverty… the list go on. Therefore, to combat drug problem, you have to improve your society and standard of living. Giving kids a good education and a bright future and they will stay away from drug.
Indonesia! You don’t have to kill anyone to stop drug trafficking!
There is a very good country in this world that we can learn from – Japan. It has a very low crime rate. Most of the crimes in the country are committed by foreigners. It has a population of 127 millions and street crime are extremely rare. The credit goes to its good education system, its great culture and belief system.
It is now the 21th century already. We no longer support barbaric justice system which was used in the Iron age thousand of years ago. This is now the age of science and reason. We need to throw out those out-of-date laws and legislations.
Signing off
-MisterWailor
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