There is much controversy around the application of the death penalty in Brazil. The human rights´ proponents argue that it is the denial of the right to life and that there is no correspondence between capital punishment and the reduction of crime. On the other hand for those who defend this penalty, there are some types of crime that deserve a retribution – and not a revenge – by the harm that a certain individual has done.
When the topic is death penalty, the Brazilian people´s opinion is divided. Datafolha Research, for example, concluded that approximately half of people questioned is against and half is[ in favour of the legalized killing.
Now Brazil is a democratic republic and its Constitution, promulgated in 1988, expressly prohibits the usage of death penalty by the penal justice system. Nonetheless, under the terms of Article 84, paragraph 19, of the Constitution, the death penalty can be applicable in case of a declared war. Brazil is also a State Party to the Protocol of the American Convention on Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty, which makes it even more unlikely that its government would embrace the pro-execution cause.
However, it is known that in Brazil the criminal system is flawed. The lack of structure on the prison system and the subhuman treatment given difficult the social rehabilitation of the convicted person. Thus, the chances of an individual becomes a persistent offender increase substantially.
But the sticking point is whether it is morally acceptable or not for the state to execute people, and if so, under which circumstances. The question that should be posed is relatively simple: do governments deserve to kill those whom it has imprisoned more than one has the right of killing another? For many writers, capital punishment is an affront to universal values on which human rights are based. When George Orwell wrote his short story, A Hanging, in 1931, there was no United Nations to establish human rights treaties. Even so, his story has power to influence readers ´opinion towards the abolition of the death penalty. There are other examples of learned men that fought against it, through their literary work, like Victor Hugo in The Last Day of a Condemned Man, Albert Camus in The Stranger, and Edgar Allan Poe in his tale The Pit and The Pendulum.
In conclusion, it would be a regression in the Brazilian judicial system to allow the reintroduction of capital punishment at a time when the majority of countries on Earth have abandoned its use. The rights to life and dignity shall be defended for all, because we are all human beings. Bringing back this penalty could create ethical domestic problems and maybe the decrease of Brazil´s prestige on the international stage.
