"Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cured for crime as charity wrong as a cure for poverty-, said Henry Ford. .
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I personally, agree with what he said as I think that the death penalty is a purely unjust and unreasoned punishment, however hideous the crime.
However, Singaporeans do not seem to think so. In a poll recently carried out by The Star, Malaysia, it is known that 83% of Singaporeans support the death penalty. In the past decade, 340 people have been put to death, most for drug offences.
According to Amnesty International, Singapore has possibly one of the highest execution rates in the world, relative to its population of 3.1 million people. The death penalty is a violation to the right to life and the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
There are a number of incontrovertible arguments against the death penalty. The most important is the certainty that genuinely innocent people will be executed and that there will be no possible way of compensating them for this miscarriage of justice.
In a "supposed- murder, often the only people who know what actually took place are the accused and the deceased. A crucial point has to made here: No matter how wonderfully skilled the lawyers are and no matter how brilliantly they lay out their case, I repeat, no one knows what happened but for the accused and the victim. Thus, it is highly probable that the accused is convicted of murder when he should really have been convicted of culpable homicide.
A second reason is the hell that the innocent family and friends of criminals must go through. From my visit to the Changi Prison, I found out that prison officials have a policy not to reveal any information on the death penalty. Even the families of those facing the gallows receive scant notice and any information about the executions is typically released only after the deed is done. Families are in a state of complete anxiety and lack of knowledge until very, very late in the day.
