by Jeff Dray

Created on: February 20, 2008

The problem with exacting vengeance against violent criminals is that in order to exact full vengeance that satisfies all parties affected you would have to be more violent and barbaric than the criminal.

Setting apart arguments for and against the death penalty, which could fill an ocean, the way that a death sentence is carried out is more akin to the kind of euthanasia offered to loved family pets and does not punish the crime, merely removes the convicted person from society.

If we were to exact the death penalty in the same manner as the original crime we would have a situation where the sentence would be carried out in a dark alley with a Saturday night special or an officer of the law would have to beat the victim to death with an iron bar.

Somehow I don't think that anyone would be satisfied with the degree of vengeance.

The truth is that we will never be able to devise punishments that truly fit the crime. There is nothing that you could do to a convicted rapist that could make it right again for the victim. no amount of imprisonment, torture, lethal injection, gas or hanging could ever bring back a murder victim.

People are angry about violent crime. That anger is made worse by the fact that there is nothing that they can do to make things right. The anger is often expressed in an extreme way, partly because of the nature of the crime and partly because they know that the authorities can do nothing to put thins right.

What makes it worse is that there are people who seek to excuse the actions of the criminal. It is an expression of futility.

When our societies become truly civilised and we start to respect our peers we will be able to begin to eradicate crime. Sadly, even in our most egalitarian societies,
this situation is a long way off.
In the meantime, whenever there is a particularly nasty crime people will call for the death penalty and people will continue to campaign against it.
Here in the UK, after a particularly nasty murder there will always send up the cry to "Bring Back Hanging" - it happens at least once a year - and the cowardly politicians will continue to resist it.

We even had a senior church leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury, seeking to appeal to the muslim community by suggesting that sharia law should be integrated into British law. There is a kind of vindictive appeal in cutting a felon's hands off but it does create another problem, that someone so mutilated then becomes a burden on society and costs the law abiding tax payer money to support them from that time on.

The law is not perfect, and governments will always attempt to pervert their standards of conduct to suit their own requirements, instance the US government's handling of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, where torture has been used routinely, against all the laws of decent behaviour.

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