The Death Penalty

This is with reference to your editorial “The Case against Death Sentence” (epw, 15 May 2010). In principle I agree that no individual should be given capital punishment, no matter what may be the crime and its motive. It is also true that more and more countries are removing provision of death penalty from their legal framework. One can draw parallels between those countries where the legal system does not have the provision of capital punishment and those where it does. If we compare the two, we would know the justification for either of these provisions. I would not like to draw these parallels but would like to state that while human beings have progressed and have become a finer species in the course of the last millennium, they have also degenerated like never before. From the experience of last several centuries we can deduce that wars, genocides and mayhem in the name of nationalism, identity, and political ideologies have not stopped. This raises the question whether human beings as a collective have become better or worse or have remained the same. These questions can be scrutinised but cannot be ignored.

This takes me to my second proposition that if all human beings have not progressed into finer beings as one would like to imagine but, on the contrary, have become monsters, then where is the question of giving relaxation in punishment? Can we allow such monsters to remain undeterred?