Capital punishment is the legal infliction the death penalty. It is obviously the most severe form of criminal punishment. (Bedau1) Capital punishment is a controversial way of dealing with violent criminals. The main alternative to the death penalty is life in prison. Capital punishment has been around for thousands of years as a means of eradicating criminals. A giant debate started between supporters and opposers of execution, over the morality and effectiveness of the death penalty. The supporters claim that if you take a life you should pay with your life or “an eye for an eye”. Opposers of the death penalty bring up the chance of sentencing the innocent and how the death penalty is inhumane. The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of capital punishment and the moral viewpoints on the death penalty. The first evidence of capital punishment is from Hammurabi’s code, a book of Babylonian law, from 1700BC. The Bible mentions that execution should be used for many crimes. (Bedau1) One example of the death penalty in the bible is “Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:12). The bible also suggests stoning a woman if she unmarried sex and had “wrought folly on Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house” (Deuteronomy 22:21) England recognized seven major crimes that called for execution by the end of the 15th century. These crimes were: murder, theft (by deceitfully taking someone goods), burglary, rape, and arson. As time went by more and more crimes were believed to deserve the death penalty and by 1800 more than 200 crimes were recognized as punishable by death. (Bedau2) It was not long before capital punishment met opposition. The Q…
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…unusual punishment’? We must devise more sane methods of execution which are quick and efficient. Most importantly we must make the appeals process more orderly to cut down on the glut of inmates on death row, and therefore cut down on the money wasted housing prisoners during the appeals process.
— Works Cited
1. Bedau, Hugo Adam “Capital Punishment” Encarta 96 Encyclopedia (CD-ROM) Microsoft Corporation, 1996.
2. The Bible
3. Bedau, Hugo A. “Capital Punishment” Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (CD-ROM) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc. 1995.
4. Guernsey, JoAnn Bren. Should We Have Capital Punishment?. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Co., 1993.
5. http://www.hotsites.com/fightback/jfa/DP.html (website)
6. Bender, David L., and Bruno Leone. The Death Penalty Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1991.
Essay on Colonialism: Comparisons Between Things Fall Apart and Historical Accounts
Nigerian Women and Colonialism: Comparisons Between Things Fall Apart and Historical Accounts.
Chinua Achebe is arguably the best known African writer of the twentieth century. And more than any other writer, he has shaped the world’s idea of what African literature is. As Rose Mezu states, “Things Fall Apart is significant because it began the vogue of African novels of cultural contact and conflict” (Mezu 1). This is a highly influential position for a single writer. So what was Achebe’s purpose in writing his novels? What does he hope to accomplish? According to Cora Agatucci’s summary of Achebe’s essay, “The Novelist as Teacher,” she writes, ” Achebe describes a dual mission to educate both African and European readers, to reinstate a sense of pride in African cultures and ‘to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of years of denigration and self-abasement'” (Agatucci). So Achebe’s purpose for writing is to overcome the stereotypes of Western readers that Africans are primitive savages with no sense of culture or history, and to combat the internalization of these stereotypes by his fellow countrymen. So where does Achebe’s purpose for writing his novels leave women and are the gender roles as described in Things Fall Apart culturally accurate? Before this question can be accurately be answered; gender roles both in history and in Achebe’s novel must be addressed. Specifically, what roles did men and women play in society in all three stages of Nigeria’s more recent history?
In the last 200 years of Nigeria’s history, there have been basically three distinct phases in government: pre-colonial rule overall by Muslims (there were some tribes unaffected by this rule), colonial r…
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…~womanist/1995/mezu.html
“Nigeria.” Encarta Encyclopedia. 3 July 2001. http://encarta.msn.com/find/concise.asp? mod=1