Capital Punishment is immoral and unethical. It does not matter who does the killing because when a life is taken by another, it is always wrong. By killing a human being the state lessens the value of life and actually contributes to the growing sentiment in today's society that certain individuals are worth more than others. When the value of life is lessened under

Those that argue that the death penalty is ethical state that former great leaders and thinkers such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Kant, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Mill all supported it. However, Washington and Jefferson, two former presidents and admired men, both supported slavery as well. Surely, the advice of someone who clearly demonstrated a total disregard for the value of human life cannot be considered in such an argument as capital punishment. In regard to the philosophers, Immanuel Kant, a great ethical philosopher stated that the motives behind actions determine whether something is moral or immoral. The motives behind the death penalty, which revolve around revenge and 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 ethical philosophy. The question of whether executions are a cruel form of punishment may no longer be an argument against capital punishment now that it can be done with lethal injections.

Capitol punishment is still very "unusual" in that it only applies to a select number of individuals making the death penalty completely discriminatory and arbitrary. After years of watching the ineffectiveness of determining who should be put to death, the Supreme Court in the1972 ,Furman v. Georgia decision "invalidated all existing death sentence statues as violative of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment and thus depopulated state death rows of 629 occupants". This decision was reached not because it was believed that the death penalty was intrinsically cruel and unusual but because, as Justice Stewart put it, the "death penalty as actually applied was unconstitutionally arbitrary". Local politics, money, race, and where the crime is committed can often play a more decisive role in sentencing someone to death than the actual facts of the crime. According to Amnesty International, the "death penalty is a lethal lottery". "Just one out of every one hundred people arrested for murder is actually executed" (Death Penalty Focus). In regards to racial discrimination in sentencing, it has been found that "racial bias focuses primarily on the race of the victim, not the defendant". Only 31 out of the more than 15, 000 recorded executions in this country have been of white defendants convicted of killing black victims, while black defendants convicted of raping white women were commonly sentenced to death (Death Penalty Focus).

In response to this, supporters of the death penalty believe that the death penalty should be extended to all murders. This is what was attempted after the Furman decision. A number of states sought to resolve the discriminatory and arbitrary nature of the death penalty by simply sentencing to death everyone convicted of first-degree murder. The Supreme Court rejected this proposal saying that "mandatory death sentence laws did not

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