Death Penalty as an Unjust Law

*For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists.

Albert Camus- " Reflections on the Guillotine "

In accordance with the death penalty partisans, capital punishment has a positive influence on the society for the simplest reasons : that it saves lives by cleaning it up from the most barbarous men and it is serves as a necessity to protect the rights of the people who form this society . Incentive is the exact word they use to defend their cause; this incentive which may help the criminal to realize the mere fact that the State is ready to punish him with the ultimate penalty, obliging him to think twice. Even so, you can clearly see the absurdity of the law because we can never be aware of such statistics , which show the criminal's hesitation, so we can never know exactly the number of lives we save , just of them we take. Camus referred to it as an unreasonable and inexperienced law when saying: * "An odd law, to be sure, which knows the murder it commits and will never know the one it prevents."

*It is by some means true that death indulges in us a great feeling of fear, thus shaping our actions, as it is by some other means also true that when driven by other forces such as revenge, passion, pain, and honor nothing can intimidate the human nature-not even death itself. Death is something we wish for, deep in our conscience, to anyone who induces pain to us or the people we love. 1 Sir Francis Bacon, an English philosopher and scientist who devoted his life to the renaissance, quoted : " Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other ." And he continues profoundly by stating as follows : " There is no passion so weak that it cannot confront and overpower fear of death ". Science is a proof of human complexity and we came to understand that human nature is guided by many forces but when one of them takes over control, there is no such fear that can contest it, not even that of death. The adoption of capital punishment came as a result of the "death fear " ideology as absurd as it may seem and on assumptions that this incentive will decrease the number of crime rates. Even in the 21st century in a modernized society, full of morality and civilization, this tremendous law has not seized to exist. 2 According to several statistics, there have been approximately 676 know executions in 2011 around the globe, however we keep deceiving each-other that we live in a modern and civilized age, where human life is considered as priceless. 3 Yet from 1976, when the Supreme Court of the United States rendered capital punishment constitutional by citing deterrence as an important rational, several states have abolished the law ultimately as they understood its irrelevance.

In the mid-ages the State used to execute criminals by hanging using gallows in front of the public in order to induce fear in everyone.* As Camus tells us in Reflections on the Guillotine his father's experience while a criminal was hanged, drawn and quartered in Algiers we realize what kind of a feeling you can get in those moments. A disguise feeling which interferes with our emotions and no matter how much mean the executed might have been, we feel inappropriate. If you would assist such a barbarous scene of a public murder, you would have been sure not to ever be in the place of the executed. We would get a feeling of self-confidence, which would help us become a better and prouder man in a healthier society since we will be the defenders of justice. Nonetheless, this used to take place in the Middle Ages; nowadays executions are made inside prisons in an isolated room ,where the only participants are the so-called delegates of justice, persons as severe as the criminal, who can bear the brutality if that moment. So how can capital punishment be an incentive for potential criminals when they barely find out what happens if they commit a crime. He won't