(DOWNLOAD) "Capital Punishment and Violence." by The Humanist " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Capital Punishment and Violence.
- Author : The Humanist
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 313 KB
Description
To understand the debate over capital punishment, it is necessary to identify the purpose of the criminal justice system. To a majority of Americans it is, essentially, to retaliate and punish those who commit crimes, especially brutal and vicious murders, thus balancing the scales of justice. To others its goal is to reduce violence overall. The question of capital punishment, then, pits two great demands of society against each other: the demand for retribution for violating the most basic duty of the social contract--the duty not to murder another--and the need to eliminate, or at least minimize, society's culture of violence. In the United States, capital punishment was adopted from British common law. Then, from the time of the American Revolution through the Civil War, degrees of murder were developed, dividing the crime into first degree premeditated murder, to which the death penalty applied, and a second degree crime of impulse or passion. This was a compromise between those (mostly Quakers) who wanted to abolish the death penalty entirely and those who wished to keep the law essentially unchanged. From the Civil War until the 1960s many states first abolished and then reinstated capital punishment.
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