There are many moral arguments against the death penalty, which should make us think twice about our reasons for supporting it. The first reason against the death penalty is ethical and moral principles. Each of us has the right to live and we have no right to deprive people of this. According to the Bible pro con essay topics, the authority to punish, which presumably includes the death penalty, comes from God. Moreover, the death of a murderer cannot bring peace to the victim, the death of a murderer cannot reverse the crime essay about british education system, and the death of a single murderer will never ensure that the act of murder never takes place again. «It was pointedly expressed by Coretta Scott King, the widow of the murdered black US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. “An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder. » The second reason is the execution of innocent people. According to the statistics, twenty-three people who we now know to be innocent have been murdered by the state since 1900. Three hundred and fifty people have been found not guilty while in death row awaiting execution. One of the most famous cases of the murder of an innocent man was execution of Timothy Evans in 1950. He was tried and executed for the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine. An official inquiry 16 years later determined that it was Evans’s fellow tenant, serial killer John Reginald Christie. Thus, taking the life of innocent people, we become murderers. If you have to determine if you for or against the death penalty (for example if you have to write an argumentative essay) then it can be useful to identify the possible the arguments first. This is because evaluating the death penalty without identification and analysis of possible arguments is less wise. If you missed an important argument your judgement would not be sufficient (one of the four requirements for a good argument). The first flaw is that it requires medical personnel being directly involved in killing (rather than just checking that the execution has terminated life). This is a fundamental contravention of medical ethics. Many people believe that retribution is morally flawed and problematic in concept and practice. Camus and Dostoevsky argued that the retribution in the case of the death penalty was not fair, because the anticipatory suffering of the criminal before execution would probably outweigh the anticipatory suffering of the victim of their crime. A more difficult moral problem arises in the case of offenders who were sane at the time of their crime and trial but who develop signs of insanity before execution. The general consensus among social scientists is that the deterrent effect of the death penalty is at best unproven. Therefore people who are insane should not be convicted, let alone executed. This doesn't prevent insane people who have done terrible things being confined in secure mental institutions, but this is done for public safety good creative writing programs, not to punish the insane person. Witnesses comparison essays, (where they are part of the process), prosecutors and jurors can all make mistakes. When this is coupled with flaws in the system it is inevitable that innocent people will be convicted of crimes. Where capital punishment is used such mistakes cannot be put right. This results in a jury biased in favour of the death penalty, since no one who opposes the death penalty is likely to be accepted as a juror. Jurors in many US death penalty cases must be 'death eligible'. This means the prospective juror must be willing to convict the accused knowing that a sentence of death is a possibility. In countries with a less costly and lengthy appeals procedure, capital punishment seems like a much cheaper option than long-term imprisonment. The continuous threat of execution makes the ordeal of those wrongly convicted particularly horrible. There's much concern in the USA that the legal system doesn't always provide poor accused people with good lawyers. For example, the cost of convicting and executing Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City Bombing was over $13 million. To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge lab report physics, it is not justice. Those against capital punishment believe this method has serious moral flaws and should be abandoned. Statistics show that the death penalty leads to a brutalisation of society and an increase in murder rate. In the USA, more murders take place in states where capital punishment is allowed. In 2010 how do you do a essay, the murder rate in states where the death penalty has been abolished was 4.01 per cent per 100 help writing a thesis statement,000 people. In states where the death penalty is used, the figure was 5.00 per cent. These calculations are based on figures from the FBI. The gap between death penalty states and non-death penalty states rose considerably from 4 per cent difference in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2010. Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report, from Death Penalty Information Center Because most countries - but not all - do not execute people publicly, capital punishment is not a degrading public spectacle. But it is still a media circus, receiving great publicity, so that the public are well aware of what is being done on their behalf. In New York and New Jersey school uniforms essay ideas, the high costs of capital punishment were one factor in those states' decisions to abandon the death penalty. New York spent about $170 million over 9 years and had no executions. New Jersey spent $253 million over a 25-year period and also had no executions. Source: Death Penalty Information Center Many offenders are kept 'waiting' on death row for a very long time; in the USA the average wait is 10 years. Source: Death Penalty Information Center We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing. Therefore if any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting it by some sin, the treatment to be commended is his execution in order to preserve the common good. Therefore to kill a man who retains his natural worthiness is intrinsically evil, although it may be justifiable to kill a sinner just as it is to kill a beast, for professional speech writing services, as Aristotle points out, an evil man is worse than a beast and more harmful. It is also linked to increased number of police officers murdered. One US Supreme Court Justice (who had originally supported the death penalty) eventually came to the conclusion that capital punishment was bound to damage the cause of justice: The Victorian legal philosopher James Fitzjames Stephens thought vengeance was an acceptable justification for punishment. Punishment 10 topics of formal essay, he thought, should be inflicted: U.S. Catholic Conference Some people argue that one may as well punish innocent people; it will have the same effect. Many methods of execution are quite obviously likely to cause enormous suffering, such as execution by lethal gas, electrocution or strangulation. the state's power deliberately to destroy innocuous (though guilty) life is a manifestation of the hidden wish that the state be allowed to do anything it pleases with life. NB: It's actually impossible to test the deterrent effect of a punishment in a rigorous way good essay writing software, as to do so would require knowing how many murders would have been committed in a particular state if the law had been different during the same time period. But just retribution, designed to re-establish justice, can easily be distinguished from vengeance and vindictiveness. There has been much concern in the USA that flaws in the judicial system make capital punishment unfair. The idea that we must be punished for any act of wrongdoing, whatever its nature, relies upon a belief in human free will and a person's ability to be responsible for their own actions. research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis.
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