ABOLITION OF THE DEATH PENALTY The death penalt

Moral and Cultural Arguments Against Capital Punishment

Reverence for the sanctity of human life lies at the heart of all the world's great religions, and finds expression in the Biblical injunction, 'thou shalt not kill,' except in defense of self or others, such as in just wars. However, Biblical justification for the death penalty can also be found in Genesis 9:3: 'if anyone sheds the blood of man, by man his blood shall be shed.' For many centuries, this vengeance-based tradition of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, the Roman lex talionis, prevailed in Western legal systems. According to Bedau (1982) as late as 1819, more than 200 crimes, including many petty offenses such as pickpocketing, were capital crimes (p. 8).

The Enlightenment and the spread of subsequent liberal philosophy led to the progressive elimination of the death penalty throughout almost all of the developed and non-communist world in the 20th century, except for the United States. First, the Scandinavian natio

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percent in 1991 (p. 258.) However, the swings in public sentiment concerning the death penalty have nothing to do whether it is right or wrong. The available evidence suggests that the death penalty has little, if any, effect in deterring homicide or other violent crime. French novelist Albert Camus (1961) said, "in the thirty-two nations that have abolished the death penalty or no longer use it, the number of murders have not increased" (p. 193). In the United States, Cochran et al. (1996) stated that research shows that "overall, death penalty states had a mean murder rate of 7.8 per 100,000 population while non-death penalty states had a mean rate of 4.9" (p. 169). States with the highest execution rates, Texas, Louisiana and Florida, have consistently been among the states with the highest homicide rates. Justice Brennan said in Furman: "there is no reason to believe that it [the death penalty] serves any penal purpose more effectively than the less severe penalty of imprisonment" (p. 305). Discriminatory Application of the Death Penalty by a Flawed Criminal Justice System. The Supreme Court has rejected the argument that the death penalty per se violates the ban on the infliction by the state of cruel and unusual pun
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