Against Capital Punishment

The death penalty today is considerably different from the way it used to be. In his history of the death penalty in America, Robert Johnson observed that for much of recorded history, executions were public spectacles (3). In the name of punishment, he notes, often gross bodily torture was inflicted upon the condemned. Historically, offenders were executed very soon after their crimes with much of the community directly or indirectly involved (Johnson 3). And, by contemporary standards, some of the crimes that were punished by death were decidedly trivial. For example, the execution of petty thieves (Johnson 3). On the other hand, Johnson notes that executions are preceded by years of confinement on death row and prisoners are no longer subjected to the indignity and pain of physical torture. Instead, he seems to believe that they are now subjected to the pain of mental torture as they are held captive until they have depleted their legal appeals, when finally they are "killed with much dispatch and (we hope) little pain" (Johnson 3). Perhaps most importantly, Johnson notes that execution today are removed from the public view and are much more somber, restrained, and professional undertakings than they ever were before. However, he is convinced that all these changes only served to produce for the penalty of death the "illusion of justice and humanity" (Johnson 4).

Johnson states without reservation that the reality of the death pe

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spite the risks in the belief that they will not be caught (Amnesty Int'l 11). Consequently, they do not believe that the penalty will be applied to them. Statistical evidence also does not support the deterrence argument. For example, if the death penalty deterred potential offenders more effectively than other punishments, one would expect to find in the analyses of comparable jurisdictions where one has the death penalty for a particular crime and the other does not, that the jurisdiction with the death penalty would have a lower rate for that crime than the one that does not. Similarly, a rise in the rate of crimes formerly punishable by death would be expected in state that abolished the penalty and a decline in crime rates would be expected among states that introduced it for those crimes. Yet, as the Amnesty International report makes clear, study after study has failed to establish any such link between the death penalty and crime rates (11). The other most often made argument against the death penalty is that it serves as retribution for the unjust acts of the offender against the victim. Basically, the argument maintains that certain offenders must be killed not to prevent crime but because of the demands of jus

Category: Philosophy - A