Capital punishment is a method of retributive punishment as old as civilization itself. Socrates and Jesus were perhaps the most famous people ever condemned for a capital crime in the old period.
We do have death penalty here in the Faroe Islands, but only in military criminal cases. It is mostly in the U.S.A. we hear about capital punishment. Capital punishment is a very difficult topic to discuss. Especially because it is not so familiar to us in the Faroe Islands. I think that life imprisonment without parole serves the same purposes as capital punishment. If a wrongly convicted gets life imprisonment, he can get another chance in life, if the judicial system discovers the mistake in time. But executed prisoners cannot be given another chance. Justice can be miscarried. According to the 1987 Stanford University survey, at least 23 Americans have been wrongly executed in the 20th century. A lot of things have influence on, whether you get the death penalty e.g. you"re status in the community, if you are a rock star or a politician. Money also means a lot; if you have a lot of money you can hire the best lawyers. The environment has important influence on which people get the death penalty. The chance of becoming a member of a gang is bigger if you live in a big city, than if you live in a small town. .
But you could see things differently when it happens to you. If a person close to you gets murdered you might want the person who did it to be killed too. You might want an eye for an eye. People that favour the death penalty agree that capital punishment is a relic of barbarism, but as murder itself is barbaric, they contend that death is a fitting punishment for it.
Another argument for death penalty is that in jail the prisoner would have a chance for parole. And who is to say that he would not kill again. I have read that of the 2575 prisoners in America who were sentenced to death in 1992, 1 out of 11 had a prior conviction of homicide.
