Dialogue Of Death Essay, Research Paper

The Death Penalty seems to haunt the US mindset. While more countries are dropping the procedure as cruel the US still holds on. Eighty percent of Americans are still for the Death Penalty, citing revenge as the main reason, which is why families are allowed to watch the execution . Organizations like Amnesty International condemn the US regularly, as well as most Democratic nations. What I want to address is why the dialogue is ineffective. The proponents of the Death Penalty make arguments aimed at people’s deepest emotional fears. They develop an idea of revenge within people’s minds by suggesting the death of family members and create sympathy for families’ victims. On the other hand groups like Amnesty International argue the effectiveness of the Death Penalty as a deterrent. They show the inherent racism of a mostly white system convicting mostly minorities to the Death Penalty. And they attempt to demonstrate the cruelty of sentencing someone to death. It’s causing sympathy for the murder victims that cause people who oppose the death penalty to blunder. Where proponents are able to garner sympathy by putting someone in the situation of a family member, opponents are unable to cause people to identify with a murderer. It is because we have no words to express their pain properly, that death penalty proponents fail to make stir sympathy, they have no way of expressing what it feels like to know the time of your death ahead of time, how it feels to be electrocuted, hung, shot, or poisoned.

“Why not lock up criminals for life if the death penalty is not a deterrent?” pro-Death Penalty advocates ask. Because putting a person in jail for life doesn’t put an end to their murdering. While our prison system is meant to rehabilitate people, a person in prison for life might seek escape rather than sit in jail for the rest of his/her life. Advocates for the Death Penalty tell stories about people like William Davis and Douglas Gray, who escaped form Stringtown, OK prison on March 16. Both serving life terms for homicide, they stole a vehicle, robbed a woman’s house for guns and car-jacked a pick-up with two rifles. When found by the police they held an elderly couple hostage on March 24, but eventually Gray gave up, while Davis committed suicide . Proponents then draw on people’s fears by telling them that jailbreaks are frequent for murderers and that states don’t report escapes nationally and categorize them differently (Murdock). The main force of this argument is not based on the fact that murderers are escaping punishment, but the cases brought up all involve civilian hostages and horrifying encounters between people and the murderers. The death penalty proponents are playing with people’s fear. They want people to see murderers escaping from jail and looking for cars, guns, and hostages. It is the fear of murderers killing even after they are sentenced to life that proponents want to latch onto. The only way to keep people safe, within this mindset, is to kill the murderer swiftly before they have a chance to escape and murder again.

Prison escapes are fairly rare. In all fifty states, from 1995-1999, there were only 36 prison escapes. 33 escapes involved inmates assigned to minimum security or inmates with work-permits for outside the prison. Only 11 percent of the escapes in this period occurred at Maximum Security Prisons . The issue that proponents for the Death Penalty plague people’s mind with, is a non-issue. Escape from prison is rare. Escape for a murderer, is almost impossible. No murderer is housed in a minimum-security prison, or allowed work release. When the Death Penalty is sought in a case, it is usually because of the extreme brutality in a crime. The criminals who would be given life sentences instead of the Death Penalty have almost no chance of escaping from prison.

Death Penalty proponents prey upon people’s fears by citing how many murders occur every year. “In this country it takes 11 years to pull the switch on a convicted murderer…an innocent person can be executed…at the rate of 15,000 a year in America.” People for the Death Penalty show cases of murder and complain about how long it takes to finally right the wrong. Extreme cases of brutality to children and a prolonged litigation incite anger. “A 2 1/2-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped, sodomized, tortured and mutilated with vise grips over six hours. Then she was strangled to death. Her assailant, Theodore Frank, according to court records and his own admissions, had already molested more than 100 children during a 20-year period.” Because we are told he admitted everything, people are even more angered when they find it has taken 23 years for Frank’s case to travel through the courts . This type of case, is not even arguing points about the Death Penalty, it just makes people worry that there are murders going on all the time and the people who are committing the crime are taking forever to be punished, ignoring the fact that the person is sitting in a jail cell during the whole proceedings. “[T]he law demands punishment regardless of the one who has been wronged… the law of the land permits no option because it is the community as a whole that has been violated.”

Death Penalty proponent’s argument against the protests that innocent people are being executed is a laudable reversal. Death penalty proponents will say “No one who genuinely worries about the legal system putting innocent people at risk can afford to waste time denouncing the death penalty. Not when probation and parole are costing so many Americans their lives. In one 17-month period, the US Department of Justice calculated in 1995, criminals released “under supervision” committed 13,200 murders.” Now the Death penalty proponents are on familiar territory. They are able to, once again, remind us that when killers aren’t killed they can kill again. This is their most common theme, because they are able to make people believe that they are likely to be murdered. Every time a Death Penalty proponent spits out a statistic about how many people are murdered each year, it causes people to believe they have more of a chance of being murdered.

The arguments made by the opponents of the death penalty. Show a very different approach. Though the argument is made very well, emotion doesn’t take part in their analysis of the Death Penalty. Proponents to the Death Penalty rely on statistics and scientific proof.

Death Penalty proponents argue that deterrence by means of the Death Penalty is useless. They explain that “rather than deterring homicide, state executions actually may cause an increase in the number of homicides” . Proponents explain, “It’s possible instead, that the prevalence of the death penalty merely reflects the population’s tendency for murder.” What the Death Penalty proponents are doing is showing why the Death Penalty is ineffective, but they explain their point by suggesting that society has a tendency to murder. The person, who is afraid of dying and being killed, sees this argument as a reason to instate the Death Penalty. If there are so many murders we can’t let them have the chance of killing again?

On the issue of recidivism, Death Penalty proponents argue that murderers have one of the lowest recidivism rates than other criminals. Proponents explain further that criminals imprisoned for other offences are more likely to kill once released from prison than murderers (Honeyman). Again the Death Penalty proponents are able to make their point, but they fail to sway people’s fear. They end a fine argument by suggesting that criminals will kill again. This statement not only incites their fear, but also challenges the previous idea that murderers are unlikely to repeat when they are released from prison. If someone who didn’t commit murder is likely to murder when released, how can someone who did murder not repeat his or her crime? Proponent’s arguments again, almost imperceptibly, bring the image of death to the forefront of people’s fears.

When Death Penalty proponents try to gain sympathy for those being murdered, they are unable to use people’s fear of death. When Amnesty International describes the pain of “electrocution, gassing, hanging, poisoning, or shooting,” it cannot be quantified . They have no way to describe the pain with words. It is necessary that they cause people to feel pain, because it is hard for society to identify with a murderer. The words opponent’s of the Death Penalty use must “convey covey…the aversive ness being experienced inside of the body of someone…whose ordinary life is unknown.” Proponents must bridge the gap between murderer and average citizen, so that the average citizen is able to feel with the murderer, to have compassion for the murderer.

The way people are outraged by murder must be transferred to outrage at the legal murder of a killer. When people have sympathy for the murderer, when they are able to feel what someone dies feels there is no room for the Death Penalty. Groups opposed to the Death Penalty have formed out of families of Death Penalty victims; show an interesting mirror to families of murder victims. Because families usually have compassion rather than judgment for each other, they are able to feel sympathy for victims of Capital Punishment much more strongly. It is in this situation that people are able to transfer their pain over to all the people on Death Row, rather than their family member.

Because the operatives in the argument for and against the Death Penalty are pain and fear, it is difficult to sort out what is right and what is wrong. It is very easy for someone to feel pain and feel fear; we do it without understanding it. And because we cannot understand fear and pain it is difficult to transfer or understand another person’s fear and pain. When the argument against the Death Penalty lies in causing people to understand the fear and pain of a population people find it most difficult to identify with, it is much easier for people to fall prey to the fear and pain they have for themselves, when stirred up by those who support the Death Penalty.

Bibliography

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Pg. 9.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/abolish/cruelanddegrading.html

Honeyman, Jennifer and Ogloff, James. http://law.about.com/newsissues/law/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.cpa.ca/cjbs/1996/ful%5Fogloff.html

Morrison, John. http://www.mit-tech.edu/V113/N53/issue/

Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Thinking (Vol. 1). Harcourt Brace: NY: 1978 (182).

Jacoby, Jeff. http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/Jacoby.htm

Feder, Don. http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/don01102001.htm

Bradbury, Michael. http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/affirmation.htm

Bradbury, Michael. http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/affirmation.htm

http://excalib1.aspensys.com/scripts/cqcgi.exe/@abstracts.env?CQ_SESSION_KEY=TYGAPHZBVPFW&CQ_TPT_FULL_RECORD=YES&CQDOC_ID=185634&CQDOC_NUM=2&CQBLOCKSTART=1&CQPAGE_NUMBER=1&CQBLOCK_INCREMENT=50

Murdock, Deroy. http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/murdock.htm

http://roswell.fortunecity.com/blavatsky/123/polit.html