Argument Against the Death Penalty Essay,Arguments against Death Penalty
WebFeb 3, · Despite the crimes that the criminals on death row have committed, they are still people. They have made mistakes, and yes they should most definitely be punished WebThe most compelling argument against the death penalty is the “Irreversibility” of the practice. A person who believes the death penalty to be morally appropriate can change WebJul 12, · Death Penalty: Arguments For and Against Essay Introduction. The area of the current research concerns the death penalty and whether it might be abolished in WebNov 2, · Arguments Against Death Penalty. Topic: Death Penalty Words: Pages: 3 Nov 2nd, Since ancient times, our societies had used the death penalty as the WebToday the death penalty has become more of a burden than a boon to society. I believe that in its current form the death penalty is a costly, discriminatory, and cruel system ... read more
It is what they deserve. It prevents them from ever murdering again. It removes the burden from taxpayers. We all live in a society with the same basic rights and guarantees. We have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with equal opportunities. This is the basis of our society. It is the foundation on which everything else is built upon. When someone willfully and flagrantly attacks this foundation by murdering another, robbing them of all they are, and all they will ever be, then that person can no longer be a part of this society. The only method that completely separates cold blooded murderers from our society is the death penalty.
As the 20th century comes to a close, it is evident that our justice system is in need of reform. This reform will shape the future of our country, and we cannot jump to quick solutions such as the elimination of the death penalty. As of now, the majority of American supports the death penalty as an effective solution of punishment. Why not execute them and save society the cost of their keep? However, it seems obvious to some Americans that the death penalty is a just and proper way to handle convicted murderers. Tutor and Freelance Writer. Science Teacher and Lover of Essays. Article last reviewed: St. Rosemary Institution © Creative Commons 4. The title is Arguments against the Death Penalty yet the author spent the whole time counterclaiming any arguments brought up rather than explaining the logistics behind the arguments.
No side was taken in this essay however the title clearly states that the essay should be on arguments against. Are you Gonna pay for them to be alive then? We are wasting money that could be spent helping the homeless or retired vetrans. Whatever henious crime one does,we are not uncivilised and barbaric to take the lives of others. If we ought to give them death sentence as punishment,then what distinguishes us from the criminals? If insecurity is the major issue behind demanding capital punishment,then the best solution is framing the punishment in such a way that the culprit would never be a threat to the society,not hanging to death. what distinguishes us from murderers is that we ONLY kill when necessary, if for example there was a serial killer arrested a death penalty is necessary because 1.
if said killer ever breaks out they could kill many more people, and 2. the government is already pouring enough money into the prisons right now. more people means more money needed. money that could go to our military or police. now there is also as said above problems with the current situation in the courts, a rich man will get a great lawyer while a poor man gets the best they … Read more ». The death penalty is funded by the taxes we pay to the government. to death when they could sit in jail for the rest of their life and this is just as much punishment for them. They have time to think about their actions and hopefully get their mind right, get some help, and … Read more ».
Skip to content. Essay: Arguments against the Death Penalty. Essay: Censorship and The Internet. Essay: The Birth of the State and the Emergence of the Modern State. Newest Oldest Most Voted. Punishment, he thought, should be inflicted:. for the sake of ratifying the feeling of hatred-call it revenge, resentment, or what you will-which the contemplation of such [offensive] conduct excites in healthily constituted minds. But the issue of the execution of innocent persons is also a problem for the retribution argument - if there is a serious risk of executing the innocent then one of the key principles of retribution - that people should get what they deserve and therefore only what they deserve - is violated by the current implementation of capital punishment in the USA, and any other country where errors have taken place.
It's argued that retribution is used in a unique way in the case of the death penalty. Crimes other than murder do not receive a punishment that mimics the crime - for example rapists are not punished by sexual assault, and people guilty of assault are not ceremonially beaten up. Camus and Dostoevsky argued that the retribution in the case of the death penalty was not fair, because the anticipatory suffering of the criminal before execution would probably outweigh the anticipatory suffering of the victim of their crime. Others argue that the retribution argument is flawed because the death penalty delivers a 'double punishment'; that of the execution and the preceding wait, and this is a mismatch to the crime. Many offenders are kept 'waiting' on death row for a very long time; in the USA the average wait is 10 years.
In Japan, the accused are only informed of their execution moments before it is scheduled. The result of this is that each day of their life is lived as if it was their last. Some lawyers argue that capital punishment is not really used as retribution for murder, or even consistently for a particular kind of murder. They argue that, in the USA at least, only a small minority of murderers are actually executed, and that imposition of capital punishment on a "capriciously selected random handful" of offenders does not amount to a consistent programme of retribution.
Since capital punishment is not operated retributively, it is inappropriate to use retribution to justify capital punishment. This argument would have no value in a society that applied the death penalty consistently for particular types of murder. Some people who believe in the notion of retribution are against capital punishment because they feel the death penalty provides insufficient retribution. They argue that life imprisonment without possibility of parole causes much more suffering to the offender than a painless death after a short period of imprisonment. Another example is the planner of a suicide bombing - execution might make that person a martyr, and therefore would be a lesser retribution than life imprisonment.
The death penalty doesn't seem to deter people from committing serious violent crimes. The thing that deters is the likelihood of being caught and punished. The general consensus among social scientists is that the deterrent effect of the death penalty is at best unproven. In a survey was conducted for the UN to determine the relation between the death penalty and homicide rates. This was then updated in It concluded:. research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis. The key to real and true deterrence is to increase the likelihood of detection, arrest and conviction.
NB: It's actually impossible to test the deterrent effect of a punishment in a rigorous way, as to do so would require knowing how many murders would have been committed in a particular state if the law had been different during the same time period. Even if capital punishment did act as a deterrent, is it acceptable for someone to pay for the predicted future crimes of others? This isn't true - if people are randomly picked up off the street and punished as scapegoats the only consequence is likely to be that the public will be frightened to go out. To make a scapegoat scheme effective it would be necessary to go through the appearance of a legitimate legal process and to present evidence which convinced the public that the person being punished deserved their punishment.
While some societies have operated their legal systems on the basis of fictional evidence and confessions extracted by torture, the ethical objections to such a system are sufficient to render the argument in the second paragraph pointless. Statistics show that the death penalty leads to a brutalisation of society and an increase in murder rate. In the USA, more murders take place in states where capital punishment is allowed. In , the murder rate in states where the death penalty has been abolished was 4. In states where the death penalty is used, the figure was 5. These calculations are based on figures from the FBI. The gap between death penalty states and non-death penalty states rose considerably from 4 per cent difference in to 25 per cent in Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report, from Death Penalty Information Center.
Capital punishment may brutalise society in a different and even more fundamental way, one that has implications for the state's relationship with all citizens. the state's power deliberately to destroy innocuous though guilty life is a manifestation of the hidden wish that the state be allowed to do anything it pleases with life. But in many ways the law is inevitably linked with violence - it punishes violent crimes, and it uses punishments that 'violently' restrict human freedoms. And philosophically the law is always involved with violence in that its function includes preserving an ordered society from violent events.
Nonetheless, a strong case can be made that legal violence is clearly different from criminal violence, and that when it is used, it is used in a way that everyone can see is fair and logical. Civilised societies do not tolerate torture, even if it can be shown that torture may deter, or produce other good effects. In the same way many people feel that the death penalty is an inappropriate for a modern civilised society to respond to even the most dreadful crimes. Because most countries - but not all - do not execute people publicly, capital punishment is not a degrading public spectacle. But it is still a media circus, receiving great publicity, so that the public are well aware of what is being done on their behalf. However this media circus takes over the spectacle of public execution in teaching the public lessons about justice, retribution, and personal responsibility for one's own actions.
In New York and New Jersey, the high costs of capital punishment were one factor in those states' decisions to abandon the death penalty. In countries with a less costly and lengthy appeals procedure, capital punishment seems like a much cheaper option than long-term imprisonment. It's generally accepted that people should not be punished for their actions unless they have a guilty mind - which requires them to know what they are doing and that it's wrong. Therefore people who are insane should not be convicted, let alone executed. This doesn't prevent insane people who have done terrible things being confined in secure mental institutions, but this is done for public safety, not to punish the insane person.
To put it more formally: it is wrong to impose capital punishment on those who have at best a marginal capacity for deliberation and for moral agency. A more difficult moral problem arises in the case of offenders who were sane at the time of their crime and trial but who develop signs of insanity before execution. There has been much concern in the USA that flaws in the judicial system make capital punishment unfair. One US Supreme Court Justice who had originally supported the death penalty eventually came to the conclusion that capital punishment was bound to damage the cause of justice:. The death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake Experience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration of death can never be achieved without compromising an equally essential component of fundamental fairness - individualized sentencing.
Jurors in many US death penalty cases must be 'death eligible'. This means the prospective juror must be willing to convict the accused knowing that a sentence of death is a possibility. This results in a jury biased in favour of the death penalty, since no one who opposes the death penalty is likely to be accepted as a juror. There's much concern in the USA that the legal system doesn't always provide poor accused people with good lawyers. Out of all offenders who are sentenced to death, three quarters of those who are allocated a legal aid lawyer can expect execution, a figure that drops to a quarter if the defendant could afford to pay for a lawyer. Regardless of the moral status of capital punishment, some argue that all ways of executing people cause so much suffering to the condemned person that they amount to torture and are wrong.
Many methods of execution are quite obviously likely to cause enormous suffering, such as execution by lethal gas, electrocution or strangulation. Other methods have been abandoned because they were thought to be barbaric, or because they forced the executioner to be too 'hands-on'. These include firing squads and beheading. Many countries that use capital punishment have now adopted lethal injection, because it's thought to be less cruel for the offender and less brutalising for the executioner. Those against capital punishment believe this method has serious moral flaws and should be abandoned. The first flaw is that it requires medical personnel being directly involved in killing rather than just checking that the execution has terminated life.
This is a fundamental contravention of medical ethics. The second flaw is that research in April showed that lethal injection is not nearly as 'humane' as had been thought. Post mortem findings indicated that levels of anaesthetic found in offenders were consistent with wakefulness and the ability to experience pain. This is really more of a political argument than an ethical one. It's based on the political principle that a state should fulfil its obligations in the least invasive, harmful and restrictive way possible. Most people will not want to argue with clauses 1 and 2, so this structure does have the benefit of focussing attention on the real point of contention - the usefulness of non-capital punishments in the case of murder.
One way of settling the issue is to see whether states that don't use capital punishment have been able to find other punishments that enable the state to punish murderers in such a ways as to preserve an orderly and contented society. If such states exist then capital punishment is unnecessary and should be abolished as overly harmful. The idea that we must be punished for any act of wrongdoing, whatever its nature, relies upon a belief in human free will and a person's ability to be responsible for their own actions. If one does not believe in free will, the question of whether it is moral to carry out any kind of punishment and conversely reward arises. Arthur Koestler and Clarence Darrow argued that human beings never act freely and thus should not be punished for even the most horrific crimes.
The latter went on to argue for the abolition of punishment altogether, an idea which most people would find problematic. Search term:. BBC © The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
Since ancient times, our societies had used the death penalty as the highest form of capital punishment. The idea behind capital punishment was simple — fear was supposed to keep criminals from committing crimes. In ancient societies, capital punishments were very common — even the acts of simple theft were penalized with beheadings or cutting limbs off. The latter was often a delayed form of death, as many convicts simply bled out shortly after. Still, despite the harsh punishments, crime did not vanish from the world. Nowadays, death penalties are considered ineffective in most countries. The USA, however, remains notoriously persistent in this archaic notion, as there are some states where the death penalty is still practiced.
Despite the controversial claims that the death penalty is morally just, it is still a costly procedure with a negative moral connotation and is largely ineffective at deterring future crimes. The strongest argument for death penalty appeals to our sense of justice. Many crimes are considered beyond redemption, such as rape, murder, and terrorism. There is a strong popular opinion that some criminals just need to die. However, the reason why this notion does not find support among the legislative circles is that retribution is another word for vengeance. Many terrorists who blow themselves up in crowds are often driven by vengeance, looking to avenge either their families or their compatriots dying under bombs in the Middle East.
Therefore, justifying taking life to avenge a life opens the door to many acts of vigilantism and terrorism. However, that claim is born out of ignorance. Conducting a single death sentence, whether through lethal injection or some other humane way is an extremely costly procedure. With how many appeals a convict is allowed to have, it is more costly to execute one than to hold him in a maximum-security prison for 40 years. Afraid of death, the convicted criminal will use every single one of them before finally submitting to his or her fate. On the other hand, dispensing with these legal safeguards opens the door for judicial abuse and error.
This is the reason why the death penalty is economically ineffective. The last argument that has to be addressed is the argument of crime deterrence. Several studies pertaining to the subject were conducted by numerous researches, and the results are inconclusive at best. In order to be an effective tool that instills fear, executions need to be conducted swiftly, and on a more regular basis than they are now. Right now, death penalties are few and far between. A lot of time passes due to legal procedures before an execution actually takes place. All of this, when combined, beats the entire point of striking fear into potential criminals. Death penalties are nothing more than relics of the past.
They were never enough to stop or even curb crime in any given country at any given period. They served only as instruments of vengeance to indulge certain base desires. Nevertheless, the data accumulated on the subject reveals that the practice is largely counter-productive. More efforts and resources should be redirected towards crime prevention rather than indulging in overly elaborate punishments that do not even work. Arguments Against Death Penalty. This paper was written and submitted to our database by a student to assist your with your own studies.
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Death Penalty – an Argument Against, Essay Example,The deadline is too short to read someone else's essay
WebJul 31, · Statistics show that the death penalty leads to a brutalisation of society and an increase in murder rate. In the USA, more murders take place in states where capital WebToday the death penalty has become more of a burden than a boon to society. I believe that in its current form the death penalty is a costly, discriminatory, and cruel system WebFeb 3, · Despite the crimes that the criminals on death row have committed, they are still people. They have made mistakes, and yes they should most definitely be punished WebThe most compelling argument against the death penalty is the “Irreversibility” of the practice. A person who believes the death penalty to be morally appropriate can change WebJul 12, · Death Penalty: Arguments For and Against Essay Introduction. The area of the current research concerns the death penalty and whether it might be abolished in WebNov 2, · Arguments Against Death Penalty. Topic: Death Penalty Words: Pages: 3 Nov 2nd, Since ancient times, our societies had used the death penalty as the ... read more
Settings Sign out. This is by no means a fair and unbiased legal system. Essay: The Birth of the State and the Emergence of the Modern State. Tell Us Your Requirements Specify your topic, deadline, number of pages and other requirements. Reply to C. Those against capital punishment believe this method has serious moral flaws and should be abandoned. When however, all is said and done, an innocent person who has been wrongfully executed is irreversibly dead.
Capital Punishment In The United States Essay examples Words 7 Pages, arguments against death penalty essay. Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade Make sure your essay is plagiarism-free or hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs. The strongest argument for death penalty appeals to our sense of justice. In America, the lethal sentence for most crimes was canceled in by the Supreme Court Nice, Amnesty International. in the same frequency category for executions as Pakistan and Iraq DPIC 1. Inciardi J Criminal Justice Year Hear Inciardi, J.
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