Should we do Away the Death Penalty for Heinous Crimes? (Essay Sample)

Should we do away with the Death Penalty for Heinous Crimes?
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SHOULD WE DO AWAY WITH DEATH PENALTY FOR HEINOUS CRIMES?
Introduction
Death penalty has been the order of the day for those people who get prosecuted in courts of law for perpetrating heinous crimes. Heinous crimes are the acts of crime that cause loss of lives of innocent people in the society. They include murder of innocent people through killings or terrorist attacks that cause injuries to masses of people, a group of people or even an individual in the society. Other people have described a heinous act as that which is considered by the society as extremely wicked and extremely criminal (Bohm, 2011). It can also be something that is abominable in the society or an evil act that is shocking to the society at large. The perpetrators of heinous crimes many times have faced death sentences which mean that their lives have been terminated through strangling or injection of poison into their bodies. The question of whether we should do away with the death penalty has been heavily discussed by the stakeholders in the judiciary but the fact has and remains that the death penalty for heinous crimes should not be done away with.
Reasons why we should uphold the death sentence for heinous crimes
Death penalty should not be done away with because it helps to reduce the chances of reoccurrence of the heinous acts leading to the death penalty. According to Hood & Hoyle (2014), when the people who perform heinous acts are met with the full force of the law, in the sense that they get prosecuted and get sentenced to death, the number of criminals in the society with such mentality reduces and helps to keep the society safe. The others who might have had the same thoughts of performing heinous acts against other people in the society get scared and as a result, they refrain from the heinous crimes. Meeting the wicked acts with the full force is the only way that can deal with criminal acts against humanity in the society. There is no other punishment that can carry the magnitude of the death penalty. This is so because keeping criminals who have performed heinous acts might pose some risks due to the fact that such people are already dangerous and can cause the death of other people even in jail or prisons (Bohm, 2011). So the only way of making sure that they do not perform such acts again is by sentencing them to death. Therefore, death penalty or heinous crimes should remain active and upheld by our courts.
Another reason why death penalties heinous crimes should not be done away with is that death penalty instills fear in the remaining criminal gangs leading to change in their ways of life. In a situation where the person sentenced to death is a member of a criminal gang that performs heinous crimes against the people in the society, the death penalty might instill fear into the remaining gang members leading to change of heart of many of them. This means that many of them might opt to lead a different kind of life and even abandon criminal activities all together. This therefore goes a long way in making sure that the society is clean in that the number of criminals in the society gets to reduce significantly and lots of lives and people get to be saved from the crimes of such groups. Research has clearly indicated that that probability of criminals abandoning their heinous acts is so high when one of them gets a death penalty of a life imprisonment. Furthermore, the studies conducted on the number of criminal acts have shown that more than 75 percent of heinous acts commented by criminals have been committed by gangs whose members have been imprisoned. They perform this in demand of the release of their fellow criminals. The graph below shows how the incidences of heinous crime increase in the countries that have abolished death penalty.
Criminal gang networks also get weakened due to death penalties to their members. If a leader of a criminal gang is sentenced to death, the leadership of such criminal groups gets deterred and for this reason, the criminal gangs remain in a state of confusion and fear. This state helps a lot in disintegrating the strength of gang groups. The networks of such groups also get deterred and for that reason, the heinous crimes rate goes down (Latzer, 2010). This is normally very good for a country because it also goes a long way in saving the country a lot of resources that would have been used in the fight against crime.
There is a high possibility that a criminal who has performed heinous crimes can contaminate the rest of the inmates in prison to act just like him. This is because, in prisons, there are people who have committed different types of crimes. Keeping a criminal that has perpetrated heinous acts in prison and allowing him to mingle with the rest of the inmates poses great danger because of the fact that the poor ideology can be spread leading to contamination of the other inmates (Hood & Hoyle, 2014). This can present a very difficult situation where the inmates can turn against each other and kill each other on prison. Therefore, to avoid the spread of such mentality and ideology of the perpetrators of heinous crimes in the prisons, such criminals should be done away with because the world would be a better place without them.
The hearts of the relatives of those who lose their lives as a result of the heinous acts committed by criminals do not heal easily. Many times such people are faced with rage and the quest for revenge against those who perpetrated the criminal acts that led to the demise of their loved ones. The quest for revenge is never quenched until they here that the criminals have met the same demise as their loved ones (Hood & Hoyle, 2014). Therefore, to make sure that people’s hearts are relived and totally healed from the criminal incidences, the courts must ensure that they eliminate the heinous criminals through sentencing them to death. This will go a long way in cooling the relatives of the wronged or killed people and therefore avoiding further killings that are out of the law. This is because if such people continue to live, the likelihood that they will be killed by the relatives of the people they wronged will be high. Such killings will definitely be out of the law. And since the aim of the cour...