Issue of Capital Punishment

In the modern period, the death penalty is a highly charged issue. Consider that not until the mid-nineteenth century had Great Britain abandoned the death penalty for petty crimes against property and confined it to crimes against persons. In the U.S. by the 1960s, capital-punishment was mainly levied for crimes against persons or the state. Meanwhile, the most controversial aspect of American capital punishment is a volatile combination of racism and interracial crime. Nonwhites are more likely to receive death-penalty sentences and are sentenced out of proportion to their population. In particular, nonwhites convicted of raping whites have historically been executed. The record of unfair application appears to have been largely responsible for the U.S. Supreme CourtÆs decision in 1972 to declare the death penalty unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment, adding that ônew federal or state statutes could be formulated so that the death penalty would not be imposed 'wantonly and freakishly.'" Since 1972, some states and the federal government have reinstated capital punishment for a variety of crimes involving murder, treason, drug trafficking, or robbery. In 1

. . .
bility of judicial or social mistakes. To be sure, it seems valid for van den Haag to argue that the core of debate over capital punishment concern those who are guilty, not the presence or absence of judicial error. Now according to Bedau, van den Haag believes that it is better to execute murderers to prevent criminalsÆ going free than to not to execute any of them so as to avoid executing an innocent person. And as we have seen, Bedau indeed favors sparing the guilty so as to avoid killing the innocent. But as a matter of fact, in ôThe Ultimate Punishment,ö van den Haag does not quite make the case as Bedau says he does. Rather, a more subtle case is made that arguments over unjust punishment (i.e., distributive justice) belong to a different exercise from arguments over the nature or form that punishment takes: ôThe ideal of equal justice demands that justice be equally distributed, not that it be replaced by equality.ö Additionally, van den Haag notes, while it may be the case that blacks are disproportionately punished compared to whites, it is also the case that blacks are disproportionately victims compared to whites. Thus the flaw in argument from racism is not that racism is not a fact but that it leads, logically, to
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Supreme CourtÆs, Supreme Court, Haag Bedau, Haag Meanwhile, Hegel Kant, Hugo Bedau, van den, , capital punishment, van den haag, den haag, Brennan Bedau, Publishing Company, death penalty, Samuel French, den haagÆs, van den haagÆs, judicial error, blacks whites, ed barbara mackinnon, publishing company, wadsworth publishing, calif wadsworth, contemporary issues ed, issues ed barbara,
Approximate Word count = 1773
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Issue of Capital Punishment