Just Do It Right

Capital punishment is a justified form of punishment for murderers and is enforced by most states in the United States. The death penalty is a fitting punishment for murder because executions maximize the public safety through a form of incapacitation and deterrence. When a person kills another person, their common sense and mental reasoning is lost. As a result of this, the murderer is no longer capable of a mentally stable life not only to himself but also society as a whole. In contrast, moral issues question the accuracy and the benefits of the death penalty as well.

Murder is defined as the crime of unlawfully killing a person with malice aforethought and to slaughter wantonly (Webster, 751). Capital punishment is the punishment by death involving execution (Webster, 162). Since ancient times it has been used to punish a wide variety of offenses. In the United States, the death penalty for murder was first abolished in Michigan (1847); Venezuela (1853) and Portugal (1867) were the first nations to abolish it altogether. Today, it is virtually abolished in all of Western Europe and most of Latin America. Elsewhere--in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (except Israel)--most countries still authorize capital punishment for many crimes and use it with varying frequency (Academic American Encyclopedia, UT CAT).

Methods of inflicting the death penalty have ranged from stoning in biblical times, crucifixion under the Romans, beheading in France, to those used in the United States today: hanging, electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, and the lethal injection. Beginning in 1967, executions were suspended to allow the appellate courts to decide whether the death penalty was unconstitutional. Capital statutes now typically authorize the trial court to impose sentence (death or life) only after the post conviction hearing, at which evidence is submitted to establish which "aggravating" or "mitigating" factors were present in the crime (AAE, UT CAT).

Executions maximize public safety through a form of incapacitation and deterrence. Incapacitating a person is depriving s/he of the physical or intellectual power of natural of il/legal qualifications (Webster, 574). Executing a person takes away the capacity of and forcibly prevents recurrence of violence. Deterrence is the act or process of discouraging and preventing an action from occurring (Webster, 307). The possibility of execution would give a potential pause in the thought process of the murderer, using fear as an incentive for preventing recurrence or quite possibly the first occurrence of murder.

Sometimes execution doesn't give a potential murderer pause, however, because those who descend into the mental maelstrom of murder tend to be precisely those who have left reason and common sense behind (Hertzberg, 49). We allow defendants (murderers) to shield themselves from justice by pleading insanity. If insanity means anything, it means a failure to respond to the usual sort of incentives in the usual ways. If insane people are completely unresponsive to incentives, then their profits serve no social purpose, thus leading to another beneficial factor of the death penalty. People who have no social purpose do not benefit society, culture of mankind, nor the basic rules of humanity. For example: This drug related brain-damaged killer barely knew his own identity when he murdered a mother and her daughter in front of a 3 year old boy. When he was finished raping the females and performed their deaths, he move on to sexually molest the boy in which he then left him to die. The retarded man then pled insanity, got to stay in jail for 22 years, eating three square meals a day, sleeping on a mattress with a blanket in air conditioned comfort and having a roof over his head (Shapiro, 61). Where do we draw the line between mentally incapable and criminally insane? When are they going to learn to resume the responsibility for their actions? The death penalty is the best way to bring forth the extreme of the extremes.

An argument against the death penalty is the basic moral issue of conservation of human rights and humanity. The argument of retribution would be even easier to dismiss if it consisted only of a base thirst for revenge. "Society must manifest a terrible anger in the face of a terrible crime, for nothing less will suffice to "remind us of the moral order by which alone we can live as human beings" (Hertzberg, 49)." This is a serious moral argument. Opponents of capital punishment must be willing to answer it on its own terms. They say that "... the death penalty demeans the moral order and execution is not legalized murder--nor is imprisonment legalized kidnapping--but it is the coldest, most premeditated form of homicide of all. It does something almost worse than lowering the state to the moral level of the criminal: it raises the criminal to moral equality with the social order" (Hertzberg, 49). Indeed, one of the ironies of capital punishment is that it focuses attention and sympathy on the criminal.

Taking into account the moral argument, by abolishing the death penalty we would under punish these criminals by allowing chances for parole just because we are human. Also a form of under punishment would be the fact that the murderer would get a better living than those that are homeless. A homeless person never killed anyone, yet they live