Should Death Penalty be abolished in India ?

                      Death Penalty or Capital punishment is the harshest punishment that one can receive. Every time a person is imposed with such a punishment, a debate surrounding it always seems to spring up. A debate has again broached up after the hanging of Yakub Memon , one of the chief accused in the 1993 Mumbai Blasts . People, after his hanging, are questioning whether India needs to revisit their policy on Capital punishment.


                     My opinion on this sensitive topic is that India should do away with Capital punishment. The inevitable concomitant  of Capital punishment is  vengeance. It is just retribution which is inflicted on the accused, exacted for his wrongdoing. The punishment is given because of the accused  being involved in a heinous crime like murder or being part of militant groups and helping them carry out terror attacks. Some of them feel that for such crimes, death is a commensurate punishment, for taking the lives of innocent people .


                     My direction of thinking is that punishment given to someone should be a pathway to  reform him or her. When a teacher reprimands a student by punishing him or her, it is in the hope that the student will not commit the same mistake again. I know most of us would want to argue that a mistake committed by a student and a crime committed by a terrorist are poles apart and should not be compared . Many would say that  he is responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent lives and that he deserves such  punishment. I would completely stand by this argument.


                    But my point is that, can we as a country gain anything by hanging a terrorist apart from maybe providing a sense of restitution  to the families of the deceased for their loss(sometimes, even this is taken away because of the time these trials take) . Does the hanging of a terrorist assure us that there will not be any future activities by terrorists. I was recently going through an article in which a statistic showed that 4% of  Americans who are given Capital Punishment are falsely accused for the crime they were prosecuted. This shows that mistakes can happen from the judicial system as well. I am in no way indicating that terrorists should be set free if no conclusive evidence is found against them. Instead, if found guilty, they should be subjected to harsh punishments and made to repent for their actions. I believe that Death Penalty should not have any place in modern society. The policy of a government should be redressing the guilty rather than retribution.