La Blague

Introduction

Death penalty, or capital punishment, has always been a part of human society as a legal system to erase the dangerous criminals from the community.

But, in the course of time, this kind of punishment came to be seen as a immoral and inhuman practice and its legitimity has been questioned.

Nowadays, it still a raged debate due to a huge divergeance of laws on this issue. On the one hand, we can see that few nations such as China, Iran, Japan, Iran, the US preserve the death penalty, but on the other hand, almost all European countries, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have abolished the death penalty.

Although others still have the norm in their legislations, they have suspended unoficially the executions reserved for convicted prisoners. Through this document, I will give a brief overview of the history of the death penalty.

Then I will devote a paragraph to the proponents and one for the defenders.

Finally, I will make a conclusion from what has been said and give my personal opinion.

History

When we talk about the death penalty, we can't say easily as another subject when did it start. The origins are definitely as old as the history of mankind.

There are a lot of methods such as crucifixion, burning, hanging, decapitation, electrocution,...

In Europe in the Middle Age, to chose which method to use, it depended on the social status of the condemned (quick, painless and respactable death for the aristocracy, and more long and painful death for common people).

There were also some special cases as witches, traitors and heretics who were burned at the stake.

Death penalty was of a various kind of crimes, “including robbery and theft, even if nobody was physically harmed in the action” (Wikipedia).

At the time of The French Revolution was introduced a more "human" way to execute the condemned : the guillotine.

It is only on 30 November 1786, that the Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold II decided to abolish capital punishment, he

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