Ethical Issues in UK: Death Penalty, Ethical Concerns, and Justice

This essay examines the ethical issues associated with the death penalty in the United Kingdom. It begins with an introduction that defines ethical issues and their significance, followed by a main body that delves into the specific ethical concerns related to capital punishment. The essay explores several key ethical issues, including the denial of human rights, particularly the right to life and the right not to be tortured, as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also addresses the issue of discrimination, highlighting how the death penalty can disproportionately affect certain racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. Additionally, the essay discusses the risk of executing innocent individuals due to flaws in the legal system and the potential for the death penalty to be used as a political tool. The essay concludes by summarizing the major ethical issues and emphasizing the need for proper rules and regulations to govern the death penalty fairly. The essay references scholarly articles and online resources to support its arguments and provide context to the discussion.

Ethical Issues

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................4
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION
Ethical issues refers to ethic conflicts that arises when a situation or a decision creates a
conflict with the society's moral values. These issues are required to solved as soon as possible as
it can turn dangerous and may involve legal actions. This report presents the ethical issues in
respect to death penalty in UK.
MAIN BODY
The capital punishment or death penalty is a practice designed to execute people with
respect to the offence per misconduct done by them. In UK, it is ruled by government systems
for governing serious criminal conduct (Miller and Blackler, 2017). This punishment was used
across many nations and even used today but is has decreased in number. There has been many
debate on this matter as it some were against and some were in favour because it is an
irreversible offence and has no place in criminal justice system. People are against it because it is
an unacceptable punishment which based on several reasons stated below.
Denial of human rights: Executing someone to death denies the two major human rights
law which were established by Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 and it includes the
right to life under article 3 and the right not to be tortured under article 6 (Death penalty. 2019).
Every person on the planet has the right to live and enjoy life and death penalty violates it.
Discrimination: There is always been said that death penalty disproportionate. It
discriminates among the members based on the racial, ethnic and religious differences and also
the poor people (Vassio, Metwalley and Giordano, 2016). At that time, the race of the victim was
enough to determine whether victim will be given death punishment or not.
Execution of innocent: Earlier, the system was not having enough evidence to prove
whether the person is responsible for the crime or not and without any proper investigation that
person is hanged to death and did injustice to the person (CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. 2017). The
penalty of death differs from other forms of punishment and it is an irreversible punishment,
one's a life is taken it cannot to given back.
Political tool: The legal justice system is sometimes unfair and it can be used as a
political tool if the government authorities considers the victims as a big threat (Braswell,
McCarthy and McCarthy, 2017). Based on the what government thinks can lead to the execution
of the person even if other punishment can be given other than death penalty.

Other than above, the other ethical issues were it has no deterrent effect on crime,
wrongful power to government.
CONCLUSION
It can be concluded from the above that death penalty is the major issue in UK and has
taken the life of many innocent people. Death penalty is lead to many ethical issues which is all
because of the biasses in the system and no stated laws in relation to it. Thus, it has affected the
many lives of the people and their family and proper rules are required in order to govern it
properly.

REFERENCES
Books and journals
Miller, S. and Blackler, J., 2017. Ethical issues in policing. Routledge.
Vassio, L., Metwalley, H. and Giordano, D., 2016. The exploitation of web navigation data:
Ethical issues and alternative scenarios. In Blurring the Boundaries Through Digital
Innovation (pp. 119-129). Springer, Cham.
Braswell, M. C., McCarthy, B. R. and McCarthy, B. J., 2017. Justice, crime, and ethics. Taylor
& Francis.
Online
Death penalty. 2019. [Online]. Available through: <https://www.amnesty.org.uk/end-death-
penalty>.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. 2017. [Online]. Available through:
<https://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/160/7-cap-pun.htm>.
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