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Introduction

Capital punishment is an old punishment in which a person is punished for his or her crime with execution. Since the Babylonian era, death penalty laws have been in effect and several books and inscriptions make a mention of this practice. Despite education, democratic, technical, and other changes we have made as a society, this phenomenon persists even today in civilized countries such as the US. Indeed, America is the only advanced state that does not abolish the death penalty by death. Do we not display barbaric characteristics as a culture in maintaining this type of punishment? That’s what this paper talks for. The death penalty is an inhuman act precisely because the law should protect and not kill people. This paper starts out with a brief history of the US death penalty and addresses the cruel essence of and the abolishment of the death penaltyADDIN CSL_CITATION {“citationItems”:[{“id”:”ITEM-1″,”itemData”:{“ISSN”:”00389765″,”abstract”:”Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that, if recent empirical studies finding that capital punishment has a substantial deterrent effect are valid, consequentialists and deontologists alike should conclude that capital punishment is not merely morally permissible but actually morally required. While the empirical studies are highly suspect (as John Donohue and Justin Wolfers elaborate in a separate article in this Issue), this Article directly critiques Sunstein and Vermeule’s moral argument. Acknowledging that the government has special moral duties does not render inadequately deterred private murders the moral equivalent of government executions. Rather, executions constitute a distinctive moral wrong (purposeful as opposed to nonpurposeful killing) and a distinctive kind of injustice (unjustified punishment). Moreover, acceptance of “threshold”” deontology in no way requires a commitment to capital punishment even if substantial deterrence is proven. Rather