Capital punishment in pakistan pdf

Onlookers often cursed the widow or the victim and would try to tear down the scaffold or the rope for keepsakes. Violence and drunkenness often ruled towns far into the night after "justice had been served.

By , fifteen states were holding private hangings. This move was opposed by many death penalty abolitionists who thought public executions would eventually cause people to cry out 9 Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, trans. Henry Paolucci Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, For example, in , Maine enacted what was in effect a moratorium on capital punishment after over ten thousand people who watched a hanging had to be restrained by police after they became unruly and began fighting.

All felons sentenced to death would have to remain in prison at hard labor and could not be executed until one year had elapsed and then only on the governor's order. No governor ordered an execution under the "Maine Law" for twenty-seven years. Though many states argued the merits of the death penalty, no state went as far as Maine.

The most influential reformers were the clergy. Ironically, the small but powerful group which opposed the abolitionists was also clergy. They were, almost to a person, members of the Calvinist clergy, especially the Congregationalists and Presbyterians who could be called the religious establishment of the time. They were led by George Cheever. In , Rhode Island abolished the death penalty led by Unitarians, Universalists, and especially Quakers.

In the same year, Massachusetts limited its death penalty to first- degree murder. In , Wisconsin abolished the death penalty after a gruesome execution in which the victim struggled for five minutes at the end of the rope, and a full eighteen minutes passed before his heart finally quit. At the same time, states began to pass laws against mandatory death sentences. Legislators in eighteen states shifted from mandatory to discretionary capital punishment by , not to save lives, but to try to increase convictions and executions of murderers.

Still, abolitionists gained a few victories. Maine abolished the death penalty, restored it, and then abolished it again between Iowa abolished the death penalty for six years. Kansas passed a "Maine Law" in which operated as de facto abolition. In , U. Congress passed a bill reducing the number of federal death crimes.

In , Kansas took the "Maine Law" a step further and abolished all death penalties. Between and , eight more states abolished capital punishment Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oregon, Arizona, Missouri and Tennessee -- the latter in all cases but rape. Votes in other states came close to ending the death penalty.

The movement against capital punishment revived again between and A number of important capital punishment decisions have been made by the Supreme Court. The following is a list of the more important ones along with their legal citations: Wilkerson v. Utah 99 U. Therefore, "cruel and unusual" definitions are subject to changing interpretations. Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber U. Due to faulty equipment, he survived even though he was severely shocked , was removed from the chair and returned to his cell.

A new death warrant was issued six days later. The Court ruled that it was not "cruel and unusual" to finish carrying out the sentence since the state acted in good faith in the first attempt.

Tropp v. Dulles U. Georgia U. Gregg v. Tison v. Arizona U. Oklahoma S. The victim was the brother-in-law, who he accused of beating his sister. Each of the four participants were tried separately and all were sentenced to death. In a decision, four Justices ruled that Thompson's death sentence was cruel and unusual. The fifth, O'Connor, concurred but noted that a state must set a minimum age and held out the possibility that if a state lowers, by statute, the minimum death penalty age below sixteen, she might support it.

She stated, "Although, I believe that a national consensus forbidding the execution of any person for a crime committed before the age of 16 very likely does exist, I am reluctant to adopt this conclusion as a matter of constitutional law without better evidence that [sic] we now possess.

Penry v. Lynaugh U. It was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment if jurors were given the opportunity to consider mitigating circumstances. In this case, the defendant had the mental age of approximately a six-year old child. In many countries death sentences are not carried out immediately after they are imposed; there is often a long period of uncertainty for the convicted while their cases is appealed.

The European Union regards this phenomenon as so inhumane that, on the basis of a binding ruling by the European Court of Human Rights , EU countries may extradite an offender accused of a capital crime to a country that practices capital punishment only if a guarantee is given that the death penalty will not be sought. Capital Punishment in the Early 21st Century: Despite the movement toward abolition, many countries have retained capital punishment, and, in fact, some have extended its scope.

More than 30 countries have made the importation and possession for sale of certain drugs a capital offense. Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines impose a mandatory death sentence for the possession of relatively small amounts of illegal drugs.

In Singapore, which has by far the highest rate of execution per capita of any country, about three-fourths of persons executed in had been sentenced for drug offenses. Some 20 countries impose the death penalty for various economic crimes, including bribery and corruption of public officials, embezzlement of public funds, currency speculation, and the theft of large sums of money.

Sexual offenses of various kinds are punishable by death in about two dozen countries, including most Islamic states. In the early 21st century there were more than 50 capital offenses in China. Despite the large number of capital offenses in some countries, in most years only about 30 countries carry out executions.

In the United States, where roughly three- fourths of the states and the federal government have retained the death penalty, about two-thirds of all executions since when new death penalty laws were affirmed by the Supreme Court have occurred in just six states—Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. China was believed to have executed about 1, people annually no reliable statistics are published until the first decade of the 21st century, when estimates of the number of deaths dropped sharply.

Although the number of executions worldwide varies from year to year, some countries—including Belarus, Congo Kinshasa , Iran, Jordan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Yemen—execute criminals regularly. Japan and India also have retained the death penalty and carry out executions from time to time.

In only a few countries does the law allow for the execution of persons who were minors under the age of 18 at the time they committed their crime. Most such executions, which are prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, have occurred in the United States, which has not ratified the convention and which ratified the covenant with reservations regarding the death penalty.

Beginning in the late s, there was considerable debate about whether the death penalty should be imposed on the mentally impaired; much of the controversy concerned practices in the United States, where more than a dozen such executions took place from to despite a UN injunction against the practice in In and , respectively, the U.

Supreme Court ruled that the execution of the mentally impaired and those under age 18 was unconstitutional. The court banned the imposition of the death penalty for rape in and specifically for child rape in In the late s, following a series of cases in which persons convicted of capital crimes and awaiting execution on death row were exonerated on the basis of new evidence—including evidence based on new DNA-testing technology—some U.

In Illinois Gov. George Ryan ordered such a moratorium, noting that the state had executed 12 people from to but that the death sentences of 13 other people had been overturned in the same period. The state of New Jersey abolished capital punishment in , as did Illinois in and Connecticut in Contemporary arguments for and against capital punishment fall under three general headings: moral, utilitarian, and practical.

By contrast, opponents of capital punishment, following the writings of Cesare Beccaria in particular On Crimes and Punishments [] , argue that, by legitimizing the very behaviour that the law seeks to repress—killing—capital punishment is counterproductive in the moral message it conveys.

Moreover, they urge, when it is used for lesser crimes, capital punishment is immoral because it is wholly disproportionate to the harm done. Although death was prescribed for crimes in many sacred religious documents and historically was practiced widely with the support of religious hierarchies, today there is no agreement among religious faiths, or among denominations or sects within them, on the morality of capital punishment.

Beginning in the last half of the 20th century, increasing numbers of religious leaders—particularly within Judaism and Roman Catholicism—campaigned against it.

Opponents, however, point to research that generally has demonstrated that the death penalty is not a more effective deterrent than the alternative sanction of life or long-term imprisonment.

Those who support capital punishment believe that it is possible to fashion laws and procedures that ensure that only those who are really deserving of death are executed.

By contrast, opponents maintain that the historical application of capital punishment shows that any attempt to single out certain kinds of crime as deserving of death will inevitably be arbitrary and discriminatory. They also point to other factors that they think preclude the possibility that capital punishment can be fairly applied, arguing that the poor and ethnic and religious minorities often do not have access to good legal assistance, that racial prejudice motivates predominantly white juries in capital cases to convict black and other nonwhite defendants in disproportionate numbers, and that, because errors are inevitable even in a well-run criminal justice system, some people will be executed for crimes they did not commit.

Finally, they argue that, because the appeals process for death sentences is protracted, those condemned to death are often cruelly forced to endure long periods of uncertainty about their fate.

Deterrence Concept of Death Penalty: Since the turn of the twentieth century, many studies have been conducted on the deterrent effect of capital punishment.

More often than not, the results have proved inconclusive; no hard evidence exists to verify the theory that the threat of such a harsh punishment will sway criminals from their actions.

In fact, some statistics indicate that the opposite is true; in some instances, states that employ capital punishment have a higher incidence of Homicide than neighboring states that do not employ the death penalty. The U. Supreme Court justices in the Furman case, both concurring and dissenting, often referred to studies that showed no conclusive correspondence between capital punishment and the frequency with which capital crimes were committed.

A later accounting revealed that during the moratorium on capital punishment, from to , the national homicide rate nearly doubled.

Since then, depending on the study conducted, evidence has been presented to show that capital punishment has no deterrent effect; that the implementation of the death penalty is directly related to a decrease in capital crime; and that the implementation of the death penalty is directly related to an increase in capital crime. Although some opponents of the death penalty are quick to argue that capital punishment has no deterrent effect, many supporters feel that the purpose of capital punishment is retribution, not deterrence.

Society has always used punishment to discourage would-be criminals from unlawful action. Since society has the highest interest in preventing murder, it should use the strongest punishment available to deter murder, and that is the death penalty. If murderers are sentenced to death and executed, potential murderers will think twice before killing for fear of losing their own life. Skip to main content. By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies.

To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. Log In Sign Up. Download Free PDF. Capital Punishment Corrections, edited by W. Chambliss and J. William R Wood. Download PDF. A short summary of this paper. Capital Punishment. Globally, the United States is one of about 60 nations that regularly employ this type of punishment. However, within the group of Western industrialized nations, it remains the only country that routinely puts people to death.

To the extent that the United States shares similar legal and political systems with other Western industrialized countries, it has not followed the trend of most European and Western-hemisphere states that have abolished the use of capital punish- ment within the last four decades.

Historically, what has been called the exceptionalism of the United States is a relatively new phenomenon. There are compelling arguments for and against the use of capital punish- ment, particularly as they pertain to its use within the United States. Both public and political positions, as well as academic research, surround these debates, which center primarily on the following questions: 1. Does capital punishment deter violent crime and save lives?

History of Capital Punishment Capital punishment has been used for thousands of years. The Greeks, Romans, and other empires employed it frequently, both as punishment for a host of criminal offenses, as well as a tool of political, economic, and cul- tural domination. Prior to the 18th century, the use of capital punishment was both common and unremarkable, and there was little controversy sur- rounding the idea that some people deserved to be put to death.

The only legitimate power of the state in cases where the social contract was violated, he argued, was then in its representative authority to deter violators through a system of gradated punishments that mitigated the potential pleasure one might gain by violating the social con- tract.

To this end, Beccaria imagined the development of a correlate system of punishments administered by the state—punishments that would ideally represent only the amount of pain necessary to encourage individuals to ad- here to the social contact, and to deter those who had violated the contract from further crimes. In the case of capital punishment, however, Beccaria argued against its use for two reasons.

First, he argued that life itself was a right that could not be justly deprived by the state. Second, Beccaria argued that capital punish- ment was a less effective form of deterrence than prolonged depravation of liberty, insofar as he viewed the former as ultimately less concrete and more transient than the latter. In terms of his classical approach to crime control, Beccaria found many sup- porters in his day. The implementation of the French Penal Code in and Napoleonic Penal Code of were based on his principles of rational deterrence.

These two forms of capital punishment stand in many ways as bookends for the shift that oc- curred in Europe and the northern United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries away from the spectacle of public corporal punishments, toward an increasing bureaucratic administration of punishment via the deprava- tion of liberty. This movement was most evident in the rise of modern prisons in west- ern Europe and the northern United States as a means of correcting socially deviant and criminal behaviors.

However, in the case of capital punishment, while some reformers opposed it, public ex- ecutions remained common throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather, what changed during this period was the means by which people were put to death.

In line with what were considered the progressive values of the penitentiary was the belief that even the most violent offenders should be shown mercy, and that even the most extreme of punishments should acquiesce to humane means. The guillotine , electric chair , gas chamber , and lethal injection thus represent a historical, if discursive, gradient toward the rationalization of punishment under the auspices of the modern state.

This rationalization included increasingly humane forms of execution in the 19th century, but it also included the eventual eclipse of the public execution itself. Executions similarly moved behind the walls of the penitentiary, with the last formal public execution in Britain in , in the United States in , and in France in Yet the idea that public executions were ceased as result of changing social at- titudes toward death is only partially borne out in the research; executions in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries regularly drew huge crowds.

The last U. In this sense, contrary to their long history as a tool of social control and deterrence, public executions had become rather an in- creasing threat to social order, and in particular, a threat to the growing rationalization of punishment as a bureaucratic instrument of state power.

The Movement Toward Abolition The 20th century began with only a small number of nations having barred or abolished the use of capital punishment. As late as , only 24 countries had either banned its use outright or ceased its use in prac- tice.

By , however, approximately 90 countries had abolished capital punishment, and another 30 had not executed anyone in at least a decade. The span of these four decades arguably represents the most radical shift in social attitudes toward the use of capital punishment in the course of writ- ten history.

This shift is perhaps most acutely a geographic one. Western Europe has seen the most complete shift away from the use of capital punishment, to the extent that no western European nation currently allows for its use. The following is a list of various book titles based on search results using the keyword capital punishment in pakistan. Register now and create a free account to access unlimited books, fast download, ad-free and books in good quality! Author : United Nations.

The highest recorded number of executions in the U. This compelling resource presents a discussion on the death penalty, covering topics such as arguments for the death penalty, objections against the death penalty, and how the United States differs from other countries in handling the issue.

Context is introduced through an examination of court cases and historical background. Author : Norval Morris,Charles C. Marson,Douglas F. Fuson,United Nations. A Comparative Analysis of Capital Punishment provides a concise and detailed history of the death penalty. Incorporating and synthesizing public opinion data and empirical studies, Simon and Blaskovich's work compares, across societies, the offense types punishable by death, the level of public support for the death penalty, the forms the penalty takes, and the categories of persons exempt from punishment.

It examines the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to violent offenses, especially homicide, the extent to which innocent persons have become the victims of capital punishment, and occurrences of state sponsored genocide and democide.

This book is a practical and useful tool for public policy makers, criminal justice practitioners, students, and anyone who seeks to better understand the worldwide debate on this controversial social issue.

Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is a government-sanctioned practice whereby a person is killed by the state as a punishment for a crime. The sentence that someone be punished in such a manner is referred to as a death sentence, whereas the act of carrying out the sentence is known as an execution. Crimes that are punishable by death are known as capital crimes or capital offences, and they commonly include offences such as murder, treason, espionage, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Etymologically, the term capital lit. Fifty-six countries retain capital punishment, countries have completely abolished it de jure for all crimes, six have abolished it for ordinary crimes while maintaining it for special circumstances such as war crimes , and 30 are abolitionist in practice.

Capital punishment is a matter of active controversy in several countries and states, and positions can vary within a single political ideology or cultural region.

The Council of Europe, which has 47 member states, has sought to abolish the use of the death penalty by its members absolutely, through Protocol 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, this only affects those member states which have signed and ratified it, and they do not include Armenia, Russia, and Azerbaijan.

The United Nations General Assembly has adopted, in , , , and , non-binding resolutions calling for a global moratorium on executions, with a view to eventual abolition. Author : Roger G. The 4th edition edition of this classic study has been thoroughly revised to provide up-to-date information on the scope and practice of capital punishment and the movement, backed by international organizations and human rights treaties, to abolish the death penalty worldwide.

As in previouseditions, it draws on Roger Hood's experience as consultant to the United Nations for the Secretary General's five-yearly surveys of capital punishment as well as the latest information from non-governmental organizations and the academic literature. Not only have more countries - such as the Phillipines - abolished capital punishment, but amongst those that retain the death penalty, fewer have been carrying out executions.

Legal challenges to the mandatory imposition of capital punishment have been successful, as has the movement to abolish thedeath penalty for those who commit a capital crime when under the age of Of particular interest is the situation in China, where all death sentences are to be reviewed by the People's Supreme Court.

Support for capital punishment is waning in the USA, where concern is mounting as evidence ofconviction of the innocent grows, and where there have been renewed challenges to the constitutionality of the death penalty. Despite the many advances towards world-wide abolition, this book reveals many human rights abuses where the death penalty still exists. These include the wide range of crimes still subject to capital punishment in some countries, the lack of protection from police abuse, unfair trials, lack ofaccess to qualified defence counsel, terrible conditions and excessive periods of time spent on 'death row', and public and painful forms of execution.

Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle engage with the latest debates on the realities of capital punishment, especially the claim that the death penalty is a uniquely effective deterrent to murder and other serious crimes. This edition brings up-to-date the discussion of whether capital punishment can everbe administered equitably, without discrimination or error, and, for the first time, considers the alternatives to capital punishment, especially the problems associated with a mandatory sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.