To Kill And Be Killed Essay, Research Paper

Kill and Be Killed

Poison is injected into the arm of a woman convicted of murder. An eighteen-year-old boy takes his last breath as an airtight metal chamber being filled with cyanide gas reaches lethal levels. Two thousand jolts of electricity surge through the body of a forty-year-old man who spent the last twenty years of his life locked up in a small steel cage on death row. Welcome to American justice.

Public execution has been established as a means of punishment since America s beginning and has been a source of great controversy. The church has long taken the stance that no man has the right to take a life, not even those who claim to do so in righteous justice. Others ardently support the right to protect and preserve their peace and safety, heralding capital punishment as a successful means to that end. One thing however, is made clear by the fact that controversy exits at all: there is no doubt that it s practice raises disturbing moral questions among our society.

The history of capital punishment in America is interesting in itself. In 1893, the first man was put to death in a crude electric chair. Although America is not the only country that has implemented electrocution as a means of execution, it is the only country to have made regular use of the horrid contraption known as the electric chair . In 1921 the Nevada legislature authorized the use of lethal gas as a means of execution. The bill called for the condemned man to be executed in his cell without warning while he was asleep. On December 7, 1982 the first execution by lethal injection was carried out in Texas. The prison doctor inspected the sentenced man s veins to assure that they were suitable for the use of a lethal drug, but refused to actually give him the shot. A medical technician administered the injection.

Supporters of the death penalty champion its success as a deterrent to violent crime, contrary to a distinct lack of evidence to substantiate such a claim. The idea that the death penalty reduces violent crime would only be true if people considering these crimes were making rational decisions, with the expectation of arrest, conviction, death sentence, and finally execution. One professor at Tufts University who conducted a study in the area of capital punishment and violent crime said this,

For any punishment to be an effective deterrent it must be both consistent and certain. The death penalty is neither. The vast majority of capital crimes are committed during moments of great emotional stress, insanity, in fear, or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, when logical thinking has been suspended. Those who commit premeditated murder assume they will never be caught.

The criminal who would commit such a heinous crime as is punishable by death is not in possession of a logical, sane mind. The calculation of risks does not take place in his mind along rational terms. To assume that any penalty will affect his actions is like ignoring his nature altogether.

In addition to its lack of effectiveness in providing a deterrent for crime, capital punishment raises questions about it s ability to provide any justice at all. In its current condition it is like a lottery determined by many random factors such as the attitude of police and prosecutors, the skill of court appointed defense attorneys, and the prejudiced of judges and juries.

Society is expert at cold-blooded, unemotional, business-like, professional killing. The death penalty is routine, ritualistic, assembly line murder whereby the state becomes a legal murder, inc. serving citizens who pay taxes to have the job done. A culture that resorts to the death penalty as a method of dealing with its troubled is showing the same desperation, panic and outrage as the emotionally twisted individual who in his instability kills another human being.