Punishment does fit the criminal in the sense that every accused person is tried in court before being locked up or sentenced to being locked. Therefore the punishment is catered/tailored/wound around the individual situation,circumstance,psychological state/position of the criminal and customised accordingly. The punishment may be standard but leniences are made if the jkudge thinks they need to be and the time period of the sentence that criminals must serve is also decided by judge and jury for each specific case. however different punishments may suit different criminals; a different form of retribution may be called for for different people.
Can you think of court cases where the law has been unjust?
A 70-year-old man wrongly convicted of murder has walked free from prison after serving almost four decades behind bars.
Joseph Sledge was jailed for life for the killing of a mother and daughter in North Carolina, but has now been found innocent by a panel of judges following new DNA evidence. Walking out of court, Mr Sledge said he was looking forward to going home and doing the 'most mundane' things like 'relaxing and sleeping in a real bed'. He said he never doubted he would one day be freed despite spending more than half his life in prison. 'I had confidence in my own self. The self-will and the patience,' he said. 'Patience is the word.' Mr Sledge told reporters he always hoped he would one day be cleared Josephine Davis, 74, and her daughter Aileen, 57, were found stabbed to death in their home in Elizabethtown in 1976, a day after Mr Sledge escaped from a prison work farm where he was serving a four-year sentence for larceny. A three-judge panel was told by a DNA expert none of the evidence collected in the case matched Mr Sledge. A key jailhouse informant, Herman Baker, also retracted his testimony in 2013. He said he lied at Mr Sledge's trial after being promised leniency in his own drug case and had been coached by authorities on what to say. Mr Sledge is the third inmate to be cleared in less than six months in North Carolina. His lawyer Christine Mumma had been on the verge of closing the case in 2012 when court clerks discovered a misplaced envelope containing hair from the crime scene while cleaning out an evidence vault. It contained hair, found on the victim and believed to be the attacker's, that turned out to be a key piece of evidence for DNA testing, which was not available when Mr Sledge went on trial in 1978.
What is your attitude to capital punishment?
Capital punishment is as controversial as any issue in criminal justice. In general the proponents of the death penalty argue that its use is justified in terms of just desserts—that taking the life of one who has taken another life is the only retribution. This stance is supported by tradition going back to biblical prescriptions of an.eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Proponents also argue that the death penalty is necessary to deter others from committing murder and other atrocious crimes and that without it there would be little reason for criminal s to refrain from killing even more frequently. They see, for example, a kidnapper having "nothing to lose" in killing rather than freeing a hostage without the death penalty to serve as a restraint. They also argue that execution is the only assurance a criminal will never again commit a murder or any other crime, an assurance that does not hold for life-term prisoners who may, and indeed sometimes do, commit crimes while in prison or upon release. Proponents also hold that the death penalty is an essential social symbol, ex- pressing the boundaries of our cultural standards of decency and humanity. All societies must set outer limits beyond which deviant behavior cannot be tolerated; the death penalty, according to its proponents, is a clear and firm statement of our outrage at and revulsion for murderous acts. Finally, advocates point out that 80 percent or more of Americans voice support for capital punishment. Personally, I believe that capital punishment is useless. Why killing living materials if you can use them for different sorts of experiments instead of poor animals. Some criminals can even be used to donate organs. I can name dozens of things where these criminals could be used. Death is not as scary as many people suppose, but knowing that you will go through different kinds of experiments can scare you to death. I think it’s the best motivation for someone to not commit a crime.