Arguments over Capital Punishment

Arguments over capital punishment and the rightness or wrongness of it as a societal act have been made for decades in the United States. For a period in the 1970s, the issue may have seemed less vital because the Supreme Court had thrown out the nation's death penalty laws as being improperly drawn. The court did not say the death penalty was impossible but only that it was not being applied correctly in law at the time; capital punishment has since been restored. In spite of a number of challenges, capital punishment has been affirmed by the Court and continues to be enforced. There is considerable public support for the death penalty, much of it related to a general trend toward demanding harsher penalties for criminals because of a fear of street crime and violence.

Yet, such popular emotional responses should not be the deciding factor in public policy decisions, particularly decisions involving lives. The death penalty is held out as a deterrent, and yet there is as much evidence that there is no deterrent effect as there is that such an effect exists. Though proponents and opponents of the death penalty may argue over such data as can be found on issues of this sort, a more basic question is simply whether capital punishment is the right sort of thing for an advanced society to use. An examination of the issue will show that it is not.

Arguments on the two sides are offered respectively by Walter Berns on one side and Mary Meehan and Nathanson on hte other, w

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manding the death penalty as if it were a quick solution to a complex problem, when in fact it is no solution at all but merely a case of public revenge and scapegoating. It is scapegoating because the death of one prisoner comes to stand in for all the street crime in the nation, as if his or her death would eliminate that crime or at least punish the perpetrators, when in fact the two have nothing to do with one another. The arguments offered by Meehan range from the conservative to the liberal. Meehan cites Albert Camus for one of the most important and cogent reasons for opposing the death penalty--uncertainty: We know enough to say that this or that major criminal deserves hard labor for life. But we don't know enough to decree that he be shorn of his future--in other words, of the chance we all have of making amends (McKenna and Feingold 180). Of course, the very idea of rehabilitation has fallen into such disfavor that the public does not respond well to this argument, but the argument still points out that there is a certain presumptuousness about capital punishment that places the state in a god-like role. These arguments by Meehan are value claims more than factual claims, though she then turns to a factual cla

Category: Government - A