Death Penalty Arguments

Should The Death Penalty Be Abolished?

The purpose of this paper is to review the arguments for the death penalty to show that they persuasively argue and prove that it provides a viable and rational deterrent to violent crime. Human life deserves special protection, and capital punishment, while extreme, is the strongest statement possible that our society believes that the ultimate payment must be exacted for the ultimate crime. Murderers themselves share this understanding, and murder rates drop when capital punishment is aggressively applied. Ed Koch points out that "Life is indeed precious, and I believe the death penalty helps to affirm this fact" ("Death and Justice" 429).

There are three justifications for punishing criminals: deterrence, retribution, and incapacitation. Deterrence prevents further murders, retribution exacts justice for wrongs done, and incapacitation renders them incapable of murdering again. In practice, a prison sentence is frequently commuted or shortened - since rehabilitation rates are low and the term "repeat offender" had to be coined because punishment is typically punitive and has limited reformatory possibilities. Our prison system, which puts criminals with criminals and tends to propagate rather than eliminate anti-social behavior, provides virtually no prospects that financially costly and socially draining incarceration will result in a better person.

Jacoby (2002) pointed out that, between 1965 and 1980, when capital punishment was i

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reasons to enforce the death penalty, there are perennial arguments against it, generally by well-meaning people who question its fairness given the possibility that someone might be wrongfully sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. This prospect is so abhorrent to many people that they dismiss capital punishment altogether without weighing the facts of the issue. First of all, someone who reaches death row has been through an exhaustive due process of law that makes it highly unlikely that he was wrongly convicted. Not only do the cases of death-row inmates receive more intense scrutiny, precisely because no one wants to wrongly sentence someone to death, they also receive better legal advice than common criminals who are not liable for the death penalty. David Feige of the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit criminal-defense law firm, states: Because of the complexity and the potential punishment, defendants in death penalty cases are in some jurisdictions afforded better than average lawyers and greater than average resources. Many appellate courts look more closely at a case when the defendant has been sentenced to die ("Appeals"). Of the 7,300 death sentences passed in the U.S. since 1973, only 32 of them were later

Category: Government - D