CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

History proves to us that capital punishment always has been an answer to the gravest crimes. Regardless of cultural differences, religion or race, the notion of "eye for an eye" is known to all mankind. Somehow there is almost no state or tribe that doesn't have a smudge in its history regarding capital punishment.

I have always wondered what it is that makes us civilized people think that only by giving a name to an act we are exempt from the main character of the action. We call it capital punishment because it is executed under a certain law by known executors and in accordance with a verdict. But the act itself remains the same as first degree murder. It is still ending a man's life knowingly.

This is when some people tend to raise their cliché arguments that child molesters, rapists and assassins surely should be killed, regarding the gravity of their crimes and their danger to society. But these people tend to forget that by ending the life of such a personal one is actually doing them a favor! An assassin or child molester, from my point of view, should be punished in a way that he or she becomes aware of his actions and its consequences. This is a proper punishment to such a grave crime, and not ending his life.

We call ourselves civilized because we eat our food with a knife and fork and wipe our behinds when we use the toilet, but some of us feel it is still civilized to give in to our animal instinct and have a man killed  because of his acts, whatever those may be. I am wondering what the numbers are of people who are executed while being innocent of the crime they were accused of. The most comic thing about states that have capital punishment is that they have the strictest laws regarding abortion and euthanasia. Apparently, one isn't allowed to end a life of one's own, but only that of another!

In Iran 16 people were executed last week. There are people constantly being murdered under the name of law and justice. In a state as Iran, where there is no rule of law and execution of law is subjected to arbitrariness and perhaps the mood of the judge, imagine the outcome. In fact there is no need to imagine, just observation. �