Religious Organizations Divided on Death Penalty: Islam Maintains Compatible Position - Research Paper

Introduction

According to Lantin (2017), religious bodies, organizations, and institutions have remained divided on the moral aspect of the death penalty. Although the seemingly explicit reservation by Buddhist and Hindu scholars, they have continued to uphold the debate with the option of lethal punishment. Such only deems the prospect of the death penalty (Kovan, 2019). On the part of Islam, they have maintained a compatible position with the death penalty. Islam has maintained a consistent attitude towards forgiveness that pays more considerable attention to paying evil with compassion and never with reprisal (Lantin, 2017). Many European nations have continued to urge the ethical act of naturalizing criminals within their justice system. Over 13 countries have a strong stand of the death penalty for dangerous criminal acts such as terrorism and murder. In Massachusetts, the federal jury lately rules out the death penalty for the culprits of the Boston marathon terror acts.

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Description of the Problem

According to Engle (2019), the death penalty refers to a particular form of government-sanctioned practice in which the state puts to death its citizens as a predetermined punishment for a specific crime committed. Countries across the world such as Europe, Asia, and the Middle East also refer to the death penalty as capital punishment and denote the crimes disciplined through exaction of offenders as capital offences and felonies. There are numerous offences punished by death in the United States. Some of these crimes include mass killings, murder, aggravated levels of rape, treason, and terrorism. Also, many states punish drug smuggling and betrayal by using the death penalty (Sethuraju et al., 2016). The type of crimes considered to be capital varies from one state to another in America and other parts of the worlds. However, the death penalty remains a crucial issue of public concern and hotly debated topic in the United States despite multiple initiatives taken by various stakeholders including policymakers, private agencies, and community organizations, to abolish it. A total of 29 States in the United States of American continue to punish its criminals using the death penalty despite being eliminated in 21 states (Brandt &Kovandzic, 2015). Through the practice, they believe that criminals will change their ways and abandon crime. However, antagonists believe that the death penalty has not served to serve its purpose of reducing crime. Arguably, the death penalty is an act with a highly-questionable moral compass as it reduces the judicial system into a murder system (Garrett et al., 2017). A society that desires to maintain a moral compass does not give room for such state-sanctioned uncivilized endeavor.

The United States has never failed to punish its citizens through the death penalty since its legal reinstitution on July 2, 1976, by the Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia case (Gius, 2015). The number of people who died as a result of the implantation of the capital punishment provisions in the country exceeds 1,500, a reasonably high number in a civil society (Lantin, 2017). Previous years only life sentence dominated within the justice system and no deaths featured in prisons. The United States executed a cumulative sum of 25 male inmates in 2018 (Kovan, 2019). Over 2,656 condemned individuals still languish on death row as of December 30, 2019 awaiting their execution (Ziebertz & Zaccaria, 2019). The condition seems to be worsening following the decision of the United States to reinstate the death penalty for all federal crimes in July 2019 following a 16-year hiatus. The last federal execution implemented in the country was that of Jones Louis, Jr., in 2003 (Garrett et al., 2017). A large number of inmates still await for their imminent death as per the recommendations and schedule developed and provided by the Justice Department (Kovan, 2019). With the high numbers, the United States still leads in death penalty as compared to countries such as Europe and Asia.

According to Ziebertz and Zaccaria (2019), the death penalty has no significant effect in the United States. However, economically, the country loses a substantial amount of its financial resources on taking care of inmates put on a death row with one single dose costing the taxpayer $83.55 (Donohue, 2016). The state spends approximately $6 billion on feeding and housing the inmates, paying judges, and paying the executors responsible for implementing the death penalty. Politically, capital punishment portrays the image of the United States among its allies and across the world negatively with strained relations especially those countries that do not support the death penalty (Donohue, 2016). Many countries view the United States as a patriarchal country which cannot adequately adhere to the rule of God by using alternative mechanisms to punish, correct, and rehabilitate condemned individuals into useful members of the society (McKay & Whitehouse, 2014). The death penalty similar to incarceration cuts the social links of the inmates with their family members, especially those who exclusively relied on such inmates for survival. However, the death penalty has deeper and long lasting impact on th immediate family members. Lastly, the procedure entails the use of harmful and painful techniques, such as injections, which increases suffering among the target inmates (Kovan, 2019).Therefore, it remains imperative to research the issue of capital punishment to help in to help in understanding its moral compass from the executioner's perspective.

Research Objectives

• To examine the death penalty and its moral compass on those tasked with the act of killing convicted criminals
• To determine whether the death penalty is an effective technique of punishing offenders and deterring crimes

Literature Review

A plethora of researchers continue to direct their focus on helping the community to have a detaile...