Capital Punishment

Capital punishment has been suggested as a panacea for the rising murder rate and for violent street crime in general, and this is an argument that infuses J.A. Parker's article whose title alone indicates his view of the matter--"Capital Punishment--an Idea Whose Time Has Come Again." Parker is calling for a return to an earlier time when capital punishment was swift and sure for those convicted of murder, a time he believes was safer precisely because of the more common use of the death penalty as a deterrent. Parker is writing a claim of policy that is based in part on false analogies in terms of the use of statistical evidence. An examination of the article shows how the claim of policy being made by the author has colored his selection of evidence and the manner in which he presents that evidence, and it will show that he has arranged his statistical support so as to make it sound convincing and cogent when often it says nothing substantive but only tries to evoke a common-sense view as proof of the assertions being made.

The fact that this article is a claim of policy is evident in the title and from the first several lines as the author is clearly offering support for the idea that capital punishment should be reinstituted not just in law but in fact--he wants to see more executions as a way of deterring others from criminal pursuits. He begins with a statement that capital punishment has been a mater of increasing debate in recent years, and then he proceeds to

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1968-74. In 1980, in the United States, there were 10.2 deaths per 100,000 by murder (57). The falseness of this analogy is evident in several different dimensions. First, the years being compared are different, which could be significant depending on world conditions at the time and on conditions in each of the countries. Second, the types of deaths being compared may be different, though it is not clear from what the author writes whether this is so. The U.S. deaths are murders, but all he says of the Irish numbers is that they were deaths per 100,000. Does this mean deaths from all causes? This would indeed make the U.S. murder numbers seem incredibly high but would still not explain it in terms of capital punishment. The author is here showing that the U.S. has the highest rate of death by violence of any in the industrial world, and he is using this implication as a rationale for the death penalty. What is wrong with that is that most nations in the industrial world do not have the death penalty, and this includes Ireland. Parker seems to be proving the opposite of what he wants to prove here. In any case, his analogy would break down because again Ireland and the U.S. are very different countries with very differe

Category: Government - C