The death penalty, also called capital punishment, is a criminal sanction whose execution consists in depriving the offender of the same life. This is an extreme and somewhat old punishment, inflicted following the commission of a very serious crime. In Italy it was in force until 1889 in the Penal Code, was reintroduced under Fascism from 1926 to 1947, remained until 1994 in the Military Penal Code of War when it was abolished by a law, and until 2007 in the Constitution when it was definitively removed. The death penalty, despite being abolished by more than half of the countries of the world, remains a widely practiced threat to life. It is a cruel punishment that takes away a man’s right to life, irrevocably. Unfortunately, this execution was carried out, for errors or corruption of judges and lawyers, even on innocent people.”Everyone’s fear is that innocent people will be sentenced to death“, the words of Robert Dunham, director of the DPCI(Death Penalty Information Center), inviting us to reflect on the too great risk of falling into wrong sentences “as long as the legal system is managed by man, it is guaranteed that there will be errors”. In 2019, at least 657 people were executed in 20 countries as diverse as America, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt. To date, more than two-thirds of the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice but China remains the largest perpetrator in the world, where the real reason for the use of the death penalty in this country is unknown, because the data is classified as a state secret. Man has the right to make mistakes and pay for his mistakes while remaining alive. The man who commits a murder cannot be killed by another man, it is nonsense. As Beccaria said: “It seems absurd to me that laws which are the expression of the public will, which detest and punish murder, commit one themselves, and, to keep citizens away from murder, order a public murder.” Life is a right and as such every man must not be deprived of it. The fight against the abolition of the death penalty continues in the rest of the world.
Martina Tana 4M
