Hi, i am new to this and please just allow me to add my 5 cent worth

[FireIce]
the person said "if u kill a murderer ... will you rape a rapist?"
May i ask, does this mean we should kidnap a kidnapper ? haha. We don't kill a murderer, we punish a murderer. And the punishment is death.
FireIce, if your objective of taking up law is to uphold justice, then i think you should not take it up. Cos a lawyer need to be rational, professional and logical, not emotional. Similarly if anyone wants to be a doctor because he wants to save lives then I think he should not be a doctor. Pardon me for being tactless here

[prodigal]
i dun think capital punishment is a violation of human rights. Everyone knows that the punishment of murder is death. If he chooses to murder someone, he has basically chosen to be put to death.
If a person can murder someone now .. he can do it again. Well you may argue that he kill someone due to emotional instability or a moment of folly. If that is the case, the case will not be considered as "murder", may be manslaughter or something else and he will not be put to death, maybe a long jail term or life imprisonment. If it is really murder ... that means this person kill someone when he is calm, logical, rational and intentional. Then I think he SHOULD be put to death, cos he is highly dangerous.
[pacman]
well solving the root of the problem ?
to me, the only way to solve the root of the problem is through education and education takes decades to see its effect, if the education is effective that is. Are we willing to wait ? Or can we afford to wait ?
[Rinoa]
how many people are wrongly accused of murder in singapore ? Just because of a single case (an extreme one) should we abolish the capital punishment? But of course this does not mean we ignore the possibility of a wrong conviction. What we can do is to improve our judicial system every now and then and a constant effort to look for loopholes in the system must be made. We should also train better lawyers and better judges so that the truth can be found and justice upheld.
You dun stop eating apples because you have been choked with one before. You just be more careful next time. We learn from other's mistakes and make sure it will not happen in singapore.
And when you give a murderer a second chance to live, you are also giving him a second chance to kill. Can we afford to take the risk ?
[Barcalys]
A very logical thinking indeed.
Well, i will kill an animal too (be it a cat, dog or rat) if i need to eat them just to keep myself alive, that's the rule of nature since the creation of the earth. The fittest survive. In fact, in some parts of China, parents eat their own newborns (or sell to their neighbours for the same purpose) especially if the babies are females.
But I will not kill animals for fun and should not.
You may say that the guilty can be fined heavily but the money may not come from him but from someone else (parents??) hence he is not really "punished" hence he don't feel the "pain". So i think it is appropriate to put him in jail, the question is how long should the term be.
just to add :
Life imprisonment MAY BE more torturous to some. But when you are still alive, you can still see your loved ones, see how your children grow up etc etc. Hence it may not be as torturous as you thought. And the President do have the authority to reduce the jail term of someone who has performed well in jail etc etc. The question is: Do a murderer deserve all these ? Or should he just be destroyed and vanish from the surface of the earth ?
In my view, no punishment is fair. The victim is hurt and that can never be undone. Punishments serve only 1 purpose : deterence.
It should not be viewed as a form of "revenge" for the victim too, as law should not take sides, ideally. So if capital punishment is effective in detering people from committing serious crimes, why should we abolish it ?