Several crimes can lead to the death penalty: rape, racism, and murder. Rape cases have been on the rise, and criminals have faced severe punishment such as the death penalty. The death penalty occurs when the criminal is convicted before the law and thus assigned to a life jail sentence. The death penalty is essential for crime deterrence since it is a cruel way of preventing those with a plan of repeating the same crime, thus making society peaceful and pure. Conversely, it has more limitations than benefits because people can change once warned and not applied equally to all genders. Similarly, it does not solve the crime’s pathological cause and does not make society safer. The death penalty is one of the best ways to ensure crime deterrence for serious crimes such as rape, but it has more disadvantages than benefits; thus, societies should avoid it by all means.
The death penalty has many and serious disadvantages than advantages. Rape is a serious crime with several complications, such as sexual violence, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and education disruption, especially to ladies (Mofoluwawo 123). As much as different nations want to practice crime deterrence by posting severe penalties towards rape crimes, in the long run, society ends up not stopping such crimes from happening. Many political leaders campaigned to abolish the death penalty for rape since it was not solving or finishing the cases of rape. One of the best ways to end a crime is not by dealing with its consequences but by finding and solve its root cause. Few things that governments should themselves are the factors facilitating such crimes within the society. Females are the most raped gender, meaning the solution can only be found after knowing how females also contribute to their rape cases (Mofoluwawo 122). In many cases, it includes drug abuse, wearing of short dresses, and moving alone during late hours of the night.
Pathological solution for reducing rape cases includes educating women on ways of putting on decent clothes, moving with security during late hours and avoiding drug abuse. It makes no sense when the people facilitating rape by moving alone in the night, taking drugs, and wearing short clothes go unpunished, yet the rapist gets punished. Both the parties contribute to this crime; therefore, they should all get the death penalty because for rape to occur, there must be a way through which the raped also exposed themselves to the crime. It should never question which gender is not or fit for the death penalty (Mofoluwawo 122). There are only a few instances under which the rapist alone deserves the punishment, such as rape and murder. In such cases, they deserve punished alone since they were not lured by anything to rape but did so with evil intentions.
Different groups have advocated for the abolition of the death penalty for rape. The death penalty does more damage than good with peoples’ realization because people can always change. In several cases, people can slip through the temptation of admiring, which does not mean they are bad people, but they are humans with feelings. The death penalty becomes too much for individuals who found themselves in the situation for the first time (Wriggins 132). The only individuals deserving the death penalty are those who raped and killed simultaneously or have repeatedly been raping because this will be considered intentional before the law. First-time criminals can constantly be subjected to minor punishment to prove that such acts are never allowed in society. All genders are equal, yet males are the most affected by the death penalty, forgetting that in most cases, the female also participates in creating a favorable environment for rape to occur (Mofoluwawo 122). Thus the death penalty should be stopped since it is too much on men forgetting that some women also contribute to their rape indirectly.
Rape criminals, therefore, should be given a limit after which they receive the death penalty. It is crucial to create a limit and publicize and educate the public to understand the death penalty. In many cases, people learn through their mistakes, and such individuals can only commit such crimes due to a lack of knowledge and ignorance. Creating a death penalty manual that describes the crimes that can lead to the death penalty focuses on impacting the public with knowledge (Mofoluwawo 123). On the other hand, publicizing through media acts as a reminder for the people not to be ignorant. Punishing repetitive criminals is right since for someone to repeat something severally, then it must be that they have decided to do it deliberately. When a person chooses to rape consciously and repetitively, then the whole public lands in danger since rape cases come with many challenges such as unwanted pregnancies, education disruptions, and rape-related deaths (Mofoluwawo 121). The only class of first-time criminals is the set of criminals who rapes and kill since it is assumed that they intended to kill but not rape as a result of desire.
The death penalty is not also the best way of deterring rape crime cases since it does not make society safer in any way. In most cases, the parties involved in the rape cases are known to each other, while some stay in the same locations. Whenever one party gets a jail sentence, their families become bitter with the family of the raped person who sued them to be arrested. Both families may be filled with bitterness and the urge to revenge by hurting each other (Jennings et al. 145). Again, it is eminent for the court to know why someone did that given act of raping; depression could be the reason for such a terrible act. If the raping action is due to depression, the person does not need the death penalty but counseling therapy since the death sentence will only increase stress. Through such depression-related deaths, a nation can lose its assets, leading to its slower economic development.
Another way of solving rape cases without giving death penalties is finding the root cause of such actions in society. Some of the root causes of rape include watching pornographic movies, which leaves people with the urge to practice the watched content. Educating individuals on ways to avoid watching such videos and their dangers is always better than the death penalty (Mofoluwawo 122). Again, public health education by alerting therapists that they may contract sexually transmitted infections is another way of reducing such cases since most of them do not know how much they risk. Penalizing rapist with a death sentence is not right since some of these incidences are created as traps; someone may want the other party to suffer due to their enmity, thereby faking evidence of rape. In such scenarios, if the investigations are not correctly done, then somebody may serve a death sentence mistakenly.
These mistaken death sentences impose innocent individuals into suffering because they are infringed their human rights. And this human rights infringement can pain such individuals to the extent of committing suicide because they get punished for the crime they never committed (Sahni and Hrideja 2). It becomes so painful when realizing a person who died in jail was innocent, yet by then, they will be nowhere to be seen. The death penalty is discriminatorily exercised since the poor, and the minority groups who cannot afford to hire lawyers rot in jail, not because they were guilty, but because of poverty (Sahni and Hrideja 1). They may have been the sole breadwinners to their family, and maybe their family members died of hunger or did not attain education since their provider was arrested and died in jail mistakenly.
In conclusion, every society is dreaming of a peaceful and crime-free atmosphere. Rape is a serious crime that all nations are trying to uproot by providing cruel punishment such as the death penalty. The death penalty is a painful experience that nobody can want for themselves, thus deterring people from engaging in rape-related crimes. Rape crime is considered dangerous since it leads to the spread of sexually transmitted infections, rape-related deaths, unwanted pregnancies, and education interruption, especially to the female gender. As much death penalty is a rape deterrence strategy, it causes more harm than good. The death penalty is wrong since people can learn from their experiences; it is discriminatorily practiced and never finds a pathological solution to rape and creates bitterness in the society.
Works Cited
Jennings, Wesley G., et al. “The impact of the rape/sexual assault statutory aggravating factor on death sentencing decision making in capital murder trials in North Carolina (1977–2009): A propensity score matching approach.” Women & Criminal Justice, vol. 27, no. 3, 2017, pp. 139-150.
Mofoluwawo Esther. Rape Endemic in Nigeria: Causes, Effect and Probable Way Out. SSRN Electronic Journal, vol. 3, no. 12, 2017, pp. 120-125, Web.
Sahni, Sanjeev, and Hrideja Saurin Shah. “Abolishing Death Penalty in India: Public Opinion, Ethics and Right to Life.” Societas Ethica’s Annual Conference, vol. 7, 2016, pp. 1-3.
Wriggins, Jennifer. “Rape, racism, and the law.” Rape and society. Routledge, 2018, pp. 215-222.