Pro Death Penalty Essay, Research Paper

The practice of putting certain convicted felons to death is a precedent that dates far back to early civilization. Unfortunately, it has become a very controversial issue in the United States over the last century. The death penalty was put into place for a number of reasons, but the biggest being the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Some would say that the death penalty does not deter murder. In 1985, economist Stephen K. Layson at the University of North Carolina published a study that showed that every execution of a murderer deters, on average, 18 murders. The study also showed that raising the number of death sentences by one percent would prevent 105 murders. However, only 38 percent of all murder cases result in a death sentence, and of those, only 0.1 percent are actually executed.

During the temporary suspension on capital punishment from 1972-1976, researchers gathered murder statistics across the country. Researcher Karl Spence of Texas A&M University came up with these statistics: in 1960, there were 56 executions in the USA and 9,140 murders. By 1964, when there were only 15 executions, the number of murders had risen to 9,250. In 1969, there were no executions and 14,590 murders, and 1975, after six more years without executions, 20,510 murders occurred. So the number of murders grew as the number of executions shrank. More recently, there were 56 executions in the USA in 1995, the most in one year since executions resumed in 1976, and there has been a 12 percent drop in the murder rate nationwide.

JFA (Justice for All) reports that in Texas, the highest murder rate in Houston (Harris County) occurred in 1981 with 701 murders. Since Texas reinstated the death penalty in 1982, Harris County has executed more murderers than any other city or state in the union and has seen the greatest reduction in murder from 701 in 1982 down to 261 in 1996 – a 63% reduction.

Anti-Capital Punishment activists claim that there are alternatives to the death penalty. They say that life in prison without parole serves just as well. Sure, if you ignore all the murders criminals commit within prison when they kill prison guards and other inmates, and also when they kill decent citizens upon escape, like Dawud Mu’Min who was serving a 48-year sentence for the 1973 murder of a cab driver when he escaped a road work gang and stabbed to death a storekeeper named Gadys Nopwasky in a 1988 robbery that netted $4.00. Fortunately, there is now no chance of Mu’Min committing murder again. He was executed by the state of Virginia on November 14, 1997.

Another flaw in the system is that life imprisonment tends to deteriorate with the passing of time. Take the Moore case in New York State for example. In 1962, James Moore raped and strangled a 14-year-old girl named Pamela Moss. Her parents decided to spare Moore the death penalty on the condition that he be sentenced to life in prison without parole. Later on, thanks to a change in sentencing laws in 1982, James Moore is eligible for parole every two years!

If Pamela’s parents knew that they couldn’t trust the state, Moore could have been executed long ago and they could have put the whole horrible incident behind them forever. Instead they have a nightmare to deal with every other year. I’ll bet not a day goes by that they don’t kick themselves for being foolish enough to trust the liberal sham that is life imprisonment and rehabilitation.

Putting a murderer away for life just isn’t good enough. Laws change, so do parole boards, and people forget the past. Those are things that cause life imprisonment to weather away. As long as the murderer lives, there is always a chance, no matter how small, that he will strike again. And there are people who run the criminal justice system who are naive enough to allow him to repeat his crime. Consider the case of Leroy Keith, a recidivist killer who became a major embarrassment to opponents of capital punishment. In 1934 Keith appeared at Warren, Ohio. There he walked up to a man named Frederick Griest as he was sitting behind the wheel of his parked car and shot him dead. Then he opened the car door, tumbled the slain man onto the pavement, and drove away in the vehicle. For that crime he was sentenced to death. And appeal resulted in a retrial. Again Keith was convicted and again he was sentenced to die. Another appeal resulted in the sentence being reduced to life imprisonment. On March 7, 1956, Keith was paroled. He was then given a government-mandated job in Youngstown, Ohio, with the Department of the County Engineer. He lasted there for three days before vanishing. On November 21, 1956, he turned up on North Howard Street in Akron, Ohio, where he walked up to a parked car and shot the driver, Coburn von Gunten.. He then dumped his lifeless body in the street and was about to drive off in his newly acquired car when near by police officers intervened. Keith then engaged the police in a gunfight and managed to escape. Around the same time Keith also became the prime suspect in a grocery store robbery at Uniontown, Ohio, in which two people were shot to death. When Ohio became too dangerous for him, Keith headed to New York City. He arrived in the Bronx and survived by robbing liquor stores and gas stations. On December 19, 1956, he joined three other men for the purpose of robbing a taxi. The foursome hailed a cab and were picked up by a driver named David Suro. When Keith pressed a gun to the back of Suro’s head and demanded money, the man deliberately crashed his vehicle into a police car. The thieves jumped out of the disabled taxi and fled in different directions. Leroy Keith paused long enough to shoot the cab driver dead. Then he engaged police in a running gun battle through the crowded streets. Finally, five bullets brought him down. He survived his wounds and was charged with capital murder. He didn’t get off with a prison sentence or parole this time. On July 23, 1959, his reign of terror ended when he was put to death by electrocution. This is why for people whom truly value public safety, there is no substitute for capital punishment. It not only forever bars the murderer from killing again, it also prevents parole boards and criminal rights activists from giving him the chance to repeat his crime.

I have also heard clich?d arguments about the futility of combating violence with more “violence,” that you can’t fight fire with fire. Now I know that there is a difference between violence and law enforcement, or punishment. Law enforcement and punishment is to crime as water is to fire, where fire fighters spray water on a burning building with such force that the flames have no choice but to back down. But the rate that we’re executing murderers is analogous to trying to quench a bonfire with an eye-dropper.

Another clich?d argument is that executing a murderer won’t bring back his victim. That is not the point of executions and it never was. Justice is not about bringing back the dead. It is not about revenge either. Justice is about enforcing consequences for one’s own actions to endorse personal responsibility. We cannot expect anyone to take responsibility for their own actions if these consequences are not enforced in full.

A final clich?d argument is the question: “Why do we kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” That two wrongs do not make a right, therefore, executions are equivalent to murder. First of all, the term murder is specifically defined in any dictionary as the unlawful killing of a person with malice and aforethought. So logically, the word murder cannot be used to describe executions since the death penalty is the law. To do so is an obvious abuse of semantics. There is a difference between violent crime and punishment. Is there a contradiction in a policeman speeding after a speeder to enforce speeding laws? One displays a serious lack of moral judgment to believe that just because two practices share a physical similarity means that they are morally identical. What separates crime from punishment are not their physical aspects but rather their moral aspects. And moral aspects examine the reasons and motivations behind one’s actions. Anti-Capital Punishment activists tend to focus on the death penalty’s physical aspects to demonstrate that it is the same as murder while completely ignoring its moral aspects involved. Personally, I think abolitionists have a lot of audacity claiming that they are motivated to oppose the death penalty by their “reverence for human life” when the only people that they are interested in preserving are those who display the least of it.

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