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 present the arguments for capital punishment while downgrading those against. In paragraph after paragraph, the author offers statistics that he intends to show the need for capital punishment and for its efficacy as a punishment, and he does so often without explicitly stating that he is for the death penalty or that these statistics are offered for that reason. In a way, this gives those statistics a greater power and gives the article more an air of imparti...