Capital Punnishment

Capital Punishment

Capital punishment is topic that has been widely debated and for which many persuasive arguments of distinctly opposing viewpoints are available. This is an issue that as always been about whether or not we, as a society, should presume to enforce a penalty that by definition irrevocably extinguishes the existence of another autonomous human being life.

Serving justice is the most common argument favoring the death penalty. Killing another human being to prevent them from killing someone else is not necessarily justice served. If a man serves a life-without-parole sentence in a maximum-security, solitary confinement prison, he will never murder another man again. He will not verbal contact with society, family or friends. His every move will monitored. He will not be able to vote. He will not be free. His right to live freely will be revoked. He will never harm another person. In my opinion capital punishment is an easy way out. Justice served.(McShane,nd)

Why then do we still execute? To serve as what we called justice. Most execution is for the families of the victims to bring a piece of mind. To so call makes a bad situation better. To kill a man because he is a murderer, in order to satisfy the victim's family's wishes, is revenge not justice, now that is murder. To believe that justice has been serviced by taking one life for another. Nowhere in our Constitution or our laws does it state that the job of the government is to take a life for life. Even if the death penalty were not amoral, and even if the idea was supported in our Constitution, the system we use to determine who lives and who dies is biased and corrupt. God is one man alone, who gives humans the right to take someone else life, at that point his/her soul is already dead and gone to hell, and you have just joined them. Some of you may think that capital punishment would scare away other criminals from crimes but that is not the case. People who plan to kill do not plan to be caught, and in there minds won't be caught. If you compare crime rates of murder and other heinous crimes worthy of the death penalty of a country that uses the death penalty to one that does not, you will see there is little to no difference. The reason for this is that most murders are acts of passion in the moment, or when people cannot reason.(Bedau,1992)

Capital punishment eliminates the possibility to reform a criminal. The government is supposed to consider it their duty to try to reform criminals not kill them. We have the capabilities to reform prisoners, and we can be very successful with average criminals. However, programs to reform are not offered to those on death row. If a criminal on death row is reformed, they do so on their own. By ending a criminal's life, we close the door on opportunity to help that person better themselves and become a good person even if unconsecrated for life. When criminals in jail take the steps offered to them to reform and do a good job, they are rewarded. Many times their time served is reduced. However, while most criminals on death row are not offered help to reform, many do. Many prisoners on death row reform themselves into decent, remorseful people. However, no matter how reformed they may be, it is not taken into consideration for their punishment, and they are still executed. Is that justice?(McShane,nd)

Capital punishment is cruel and unusual. No I don't agree with it, and like those other barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. Murder is abhorrent, and any policy of state-authorized killings is immoral. Capital punishment denies due process of law. It forever deprives an individual of benefits of new evidence or new law that might warrant the reversal of a conviction or the setting aside of a death sentence. Executions give society the unmistakable message that human life no longer deserves respect when it is useful to take it and that homicide is legitimate when deemed justified by pragmatic concerns.(Bedau,1987)

Here are two cases when an innocent person was convicted of murder and sentence to death. (1) In Texas from the 1980s tells an even more sordid story. In 1980 a black high school janitor, Clarence Brandley, and his white co-worker found the body of a missing 15-year-old white schoolgirl. Interrogated by the police, they were told, "One of you two is going to hang for this." Looking at Brandley, the officer said, "Since you're the nigger, you're elected." In a classic case of rush to judgment, Brandley was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The circumstantial