Essay On The Pros And Cons Of The Death Penalty

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There are severals pros and cons for having death penalty system in China.
PROS
DETERRENCE EFFECT
The death penalty can act as a threat to deter people from offending the crime listed in the list of capital offences. There are two forms of deterrence. The first type is the specific deterrence it aims to discourage the criminals (never got caught before) committing the crimes listed in the list again. After they understand the consequences for them if they commit the crime, they would not dare to commit crimes again. The second type of deterrence is general deterrence if aims to discourage the public from committing the crime by showing them the consequences of those who committed the crimes already. By doing so, the public would fear about the punishment (death penalty).
COST …show more content…

After understanding the pros and cons of the death penalty, it leads to a question that is it still suitable for China to continue to have the death penalty in the legal system.
According to history, we can see that the sentences of committing crimes have evolved from cruel to more humane form. It is an inevitable outcome that the sentences for offenders committing crimes to be more civilized and at last the use of death sentence will be abolished by Chinese government in the future. However, there are still abundant of incorrigible criminals in China and the citizens are not well educated. This means that death penalty is still in need in China nowadays. Maintaining the death penalty can suppress the criminals from committing the crime and maintain social order.
In the future, if the country wants to abolish the use of death penalty, the country can start with cutting crimes from the list of capital offenses to reduce the number of death penalty. It is not a must for the country to completely erase death penalty from the legal system, just like Cuba and Morocco, the country can retain it but do not apply it for sentencing in the future.