Death Penelty

The death penalty is morally and socially unethical, and should be interpreted as cruel and unusual punishment since it is both discriminatory and prejudicial; it has no proof of serving as a deterrent, and it risks the brutal and unacceptable injustice of executing innocent people. As long as capital punishment exists in our society it will continue to spark the injustice which it has failed to control.

Capital punishment is not only immoral and unethical but it doesn’t matter who has done the killing because when life is taken by another human it is wrong. By killing a human being the government lessens the society’s value of life and also contributes to the growing opinion today that certain individuals are worth more than others. When the value of life is lessened under certain circ

Best put by Professor Nathanson, "to maintain the death penalty is to be willing to risk innocent lives." In 1987, there was a study conducted by Hugo Bedau and Michael Radelet that appeared in the Standford Law Review that was concerning the execution of innocent people. The study concluded that in a period of eighty years from 1900 to 1980, that about "350 people were wrongfully convicted of capital offenses, and out of that 350 139 of them were sentenced to death, and 23 of those 139 were actually executed" (Nathanson 344). Over this eighty year period this figure averages out to the death of an innocent person about every 3.4 years. The fact that that many innocent people are being executed is extremely disturbing and rightfully so, yet many death penalty advocates deliberately disregard this information or they attempt to justify it in some way.

In regards to the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, the great ethical philosopher, He stated that the motives behind actions determine whether something is moral or immoral (Palmer 271) and the motives that generally revolve around the death penalty, are those of resolve and the revenge but the "frustration and rage of people who see that the government is not coping with violent crime," are not of good will, thereby making capital punishment immoral according to many ethical philosophers (Bruck 329).

According to David Bruck, a prominent lawyer for South Carolina Office of Appellate Defense, "all Bedau was saying was that doubts concerning executed prisoners' guilt are almost never resolved." Koch also failed to relate in his essay that Bedau, who had not yet released the 1987 study, had already comprised a "list of murder convictions since 1900 in which the state eventually admitted error" in about 400 hundred cases. Another response to the fact that innocent people have been executed is that the small number of innocent people executed outweighs the number of lives that will be saved since the possibility of being executed will deter others from committing a murder, and also lives will be saved since that murderer cannot kill again. Although scientific studies have failed to prove that executions deter others from committing crime. According to Dr. Ernest van den Haag, a well- known scholar in favor of the death penalty, "one cannot claim that it has been proved statistically that the death penalty does deter more than alternative penalties" (Haag 338). However, Haag supports his stand on the death penalty by stating that, "when they have the choice between life and death, 99 percent of all prisoners under sentence of death prefers life in prison." This statistic proves nothing but the fact that man has an innate desire for survival. Those who where asked the question had already committed the crime and thus it did not reflect the sentiment of those who may be considering a crime. Also, people often kill when under great "emotional stress or under the influence of drugs or alcohol - times when they are not thinking of the consequences" (Death Penalty Focus). But career criminals and those that plan a crime never expect to be caught, thus making the consequences an invalid issue.

Some topics in this essay:
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