Capital punishment is not a morally acceptable practice because the trial has come to represent a form of torture in our modern society and therefore should not be seen as an acceptable form of punishment for any criminal act. The purpose of a punishment is to adequately reprimand the criminal so that justice is served against the victim. This can be achieved without violating our moral standards through the use of punishments that sufficiently punish the offender while still doing right by the victim. Capital punishment may be the fairest option of punishment when punishing a murderer, but it constitutes an injustice to the people who have to carry out the duty and has also become a torturous experience for the offender. Cesare Beccaria discusses the issue of torture in his work Essay on crimes and punishments. He states that either the crime is certain or uncertain, and in both circumstances torture is not a legitimate punishment (Beccaria 530). When a crime has certainly been committed and already has a punishment assigned by law, it is useless to torture because it is not necessary to torture the convicted person to obtain a confession. If the evidence is not sufficient to convict the perpetrator of the crime, "it is unjust to torture an innocent person, as the law judges him to be, whose crimes have not yet been proven" (Beccaria 530). Torture, therefore, is not acceptable under any circumstances as punishment and should not be used. It is important to assign punishments in proportion to the crime committed. Immanuel Kant comments on this in his work, The Retributive Theory of Punishment, arguing that the way of measuring punishment is based on “the principle of equality, according to which the scale pointer… in the center of the paper… . ..alty, but the process leading up to it makes it a torturous and unjust form of punishment. Therefore, capital punishment is not a morally permissible practice and should be abolished. Works Cited Johnson, Robert. Deadly Work: A Study of the Modern Performance Process. Ed. Sabra Horne, et al. 2nd. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998. Print.Reiman, Jeffrey H. “Justice, Civility, and the Death Penalty” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 2 (Spring 1985): Princeton University Press, 1985. Print.Kant, Immanuel, and William Hastie. The philosophy of law: an exposition of the fundamental principles of jurisprudence as a science of law. Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2002. Print.Beccaria, Cesare. “An Essay on Crime and Punishment” The Portable Enlightenment Reader.Ed. Isaac Kramnick. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. 525-32.