Death Penalty Arguments
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Arguments about the right of society to demand the ultimate punishment through the death penalty have been made for decades in the United States. In the 1970s, the issue might have seemed more academic than real because the Supreme Court had thrown out the nation's death penalty laws as being improperly drawn. Since the court did not say the death penalty could never be applied but only that it was not being applied correctly in law at the time, the death penalty has been reinstituted with language that conforms to the parameters set by the Supreme Court. 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, many question whether such popular emotional responses should be the deciding factor in public policy decisions, particularly decisions involving lives. Stephen Nathanson offers several arguments for why he is against the death penalty and why he believes that society should not impose it. An examination of those arguments will lead to a consideration of counter-arguments by those who see the death penalty as a punishment that society should mete out to egregious offenders. One argument raised by both sides in the death penalty argument as a justification for their position is the need for there to be a re
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hat society will kill someone who commits them. The individual internalizes the association of the act and the penalty throughout his life, constantly increasing his resistance to committing the act. Note that there is no implication here that the potential murderer consciously weighs the alternatives and decides that the crime is worth life in prison, but not death. . . There is no a priori reason for assuming that this process is less relevant to emotional acts than rational acts. . . (Goldberg 42).
Robert W. Lee points out that to say that the death penalty is not a deterrent is to allege that people are not afraid of dying, though there is ample evidence to the contrary throughout our society, from warning signs on the road to labels warning of poison on bottles in the kitchen (Lee 98).
Nathanson raises the issue of whether or not the death penalty is applied in an arbitrary manner, and this goes to the issue of fairness. Nathanson agrees that supporters of the death penalty have tried to address the issue of arbitrariness, but he says they have failed. nathanson begins with two statements which he says are true and so militate against the continuation of the death penalty:
1) People who commit murder do not deserve t
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Approximate Word count = 2001
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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