Capital Punishment Essay, Research Paper

Several of the reasons put forward for capital punishment have to do with the protection of society. Certain criminals must die, the defenders of the death penalty argue, so the rest of us can be safe or, at least, safer.

How do the deaths of some criminals protect the rest of us? In several ways, according to the death penalty’s proponents. On one level, the execution of dangerous criminals can be seen as a simple matter of self-defense, because, at the very least, death stops executed criminals from ever repeating their crimes. Death penalty is a fair punishment for murder, because vicious criminals are like rabid animals that must be destroyed. There is no way to cure them of their disease, which makes them attack and kill others. Why not simply get rid of them before they kill or injure someone else? As the scientist Albert Einstein once suggested, ” There is no reason why society should not rid itself of individuals proved socially harmful.”

Robert E. Crowe, the Illinois state’s attorney who demanded the death sentence for the infamous Chicago murderers Leopold and Loeb, was a great supporter of capital punishment. ” I urge capital punishment for murder,” he once explained, ” not because I believe that society wishes to take the life of a murderer, but because society does not wish to lose its own?.It is the finality of the death penalty which instills fear in the heart of every murderer, and it is this fear of punishment which protects society.”

In other words, Crowe wanted Leopold and Loebe to die, not to protect society from them, but to protect society from others who might come after them. This is probably the most common of all the arguments made for the death penalty— the belief that the deaths of some criminals will deter others from committing similar crimes. Some people believe, so long as a prisoner is alive, there is some risk that he will commit a new crime, either in prison or after an escape. In that sense, a death sentence incapacitates more than a life sentence does.

(Capital Punishment, a reference Handbook By Michael Kronenwetter.)

There are cliched arguments against capital punishment. Some people believe that violence the futility of combating violence with more ” Violence”, that you can not fight fire with fire. Other people believe that ” Violence does not solve anything.” However, Robert A Heinlien’s Starship Troopers illustrates that, ” The idea that violence doesn’t solve anything” is a historically untrue and immoral doctrine. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. People that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”

Another cliched 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. To begin with, 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 can not be used to describe executions. To do so is an obvious abuse of semantics. Second of all, comparing executions to murders is like comparing incarcerating people kidnapping or charging taxes and fines to extortion. There is a difference between violent crime and punishmnet. 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. Law enforcement officials act well within the law when they punish criminals whether it be by charging fines, incarcerating them, or conducting executions, thereby, defending public safety.

Nineteenth-century English philosopher and reformer John Stuart Mill, stated: ” Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable it is to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is to show want to regard for human life. We show, on the contrary? our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to live, this shall.”

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The Morality of capital punishment is fair for many victims. On a final note, how can a murder be taken seriously if the penalty in not equally as serious? A crime, after all, is only as severe as the punishment that follows it. As Edward Koch once said: When I think of the thousands of inhabitants of Death Rows in the hundreds of prisons in this country?My reaction is: What’s taking us so long? Let’s get that electrical current flowing. Drop those pellets [of poison gas] now! Whenever I ague this with friends who have opposite views, they say that I don’t have enough regard for the most marvelous of miracles-human life. Just the opposite: it’s because I have so much regard for human life that I favor capital punishment. Murder is the most terrible crime there is. Anything less than the death penalty is an insult to the victim and society. It says? that we don’t value the victim’s life enough to punish the killer fullly.

Lord Justice Denning, Master of the Rolls of the Court of Appeals in England said that the Royal Commission on Capital punishment: ” punishment is the way in which society expresses its denunciation of wrong doing; and, in order to maintain respect for the law, it is essential that the punishment inflicted for grave crimes should adequately reflect the revulsion felt by the great majority of citizens for them. It is a mistake to consider the object of punishment as being a deterrent or reformative or preventive and nothing else? The truth is that some crimes are so outrageous that society insists on adequate punishment, because the wrong doer deserves it, irrespective of whether it is a deterrent or not.

In J.J. Rouseau’s the social Contact written in 1762, he says the following: “Again, every rogue who criminously attacks social rights becomes, by his wrong, a rebel and a traitor to his fatherland. By contravening its laws, he ceases to be one of its citizens: he even wages war against it. In such circumstances, the Statee and he cannot both be saved: one or the other must perish. In killing the criminal, we destroy not so