Why should a murderer be permitted to breathe as his or her victims lie 6 feet under? Murderers no longer serve a useful purpose to society.
This paper seeks to provide an insight into The Death Penalty and its previous corroboration in the legal system of Trinidad and Tobago. Additionally, important positions are outlined and supported stating why this form of punishment should …show more content…
When a criminal is executed, rebutters argue that the measures are too extreme. That “an eye for an eye” is not established since that which was done to the victim was not reciprocated to the criminal, rather worse is done to him. However, ‘murder is different’. A victim did not ask for his life to be taken, he was innocent, this is murder, and so the reciprocal for murder should be death by law. The antagonists to the death penalty oppose methods such as fire squad, electrocution, burning, boiling, beheading, lethal injection and gas chamber. However, in Trinidad and Tobago, the least painful and quickest method of the death penalty, hanging, is implemented, so how can the opposition argue that the death penalty is crueler than life in prison? The death penalty in Trinidad and Tobago serves the main purpose of eradicating murderers rather than punishing them. Additionally, long life sentences are crueler to the prisoner than capital punishment; life in prison makes a prisoner beg that his/her day of execution comes faster than the set date. According to Sir Alexander Paterson, Commissioner of Prisons in 1930, stated (cited in Hitchens, 2003: 185):
“It requires a superhuman to survive 20 years of imprisonment with character and soul intact…I gravely doubt whether an average man can serve more than ten continuous years in prison without