The death penalty.

" In what sense can the death penalty be part of a justice system? " The idealised view of justice in the West is that it is blind. It does not recognise any difference between the rich and the poor, or the educated and the uneducated. A judge is obliged to give the same sentence to either, and therefore sees everyone as equal. The death penalty forces us to look at the problems of putting an ideal system of justice such as this into practice. By accepting that the death penalty is the severest punishment available for any society to inflict on an individual, we can see how our view of crimes and the punishments they should recei ve may be affected. is that the law is a kind of social contract. Hobbes claimed in his book The Leviathan (1651), that human life before society was " nasty, brutish and short " and that we would kill each other for food or otherwise if there were no laws or government to force us to behave ourselves. To avoid this problem we give up our free rights as an individual to a " sovereign " power, which is ultimately controlled by the social contract. The law can then be defined as that which prohibits the carrying out of these free rights we have given up, such as murder, assault and burglary. The questions of what role punishment plays in such a social contract and what justifies the most extreme punishment available are those considered in this essay.