Capital punishment

People are made by the grace of their creator with a lot of things e.i wills that make free to do every things they want and differe them each other. By example I make exercices every day because I want to be strong or to feel good in my body while my neighbor doesn't want it but likes to go to the forest to kill animals. Any way people make their own choice just for them to protect themselves. But the laws are made to punish some behavior the the society judge bad for its well-beings and at the same way condemn the perpetrators of these misbehavior by breaking these laws. These punishments are not appeling vigor because their not in a same proportion. Some of them are called for arson at the same time others are called for murder or terrorist acts. But we are going to talk only about capital punishment.


Generally, philosophers discuss punishment in terme of five elements. For somethings to be punishment, it must 1) pain, 2)be administred for an offense against a law or rule, 3) be administred to someone who has been judge guilty of an offense, 4) be imposed by someone other thean the offender, 5) be imposed by rigthful authority. Whether a punishment is commensurate with an offense, whether it is fair and equitable - these are very important moral and legal questions. But they must be distinguished from the question of what punishment is.

The last four traditional sanctions is the capital punishment, or a sentence of death. A death sentence is, of course, the most extree sentencing option available in the U.S..A today. In 1995, the state of New-York reinstated the death penalty after a thirty-year hiatus, and today thirty-eight states and the federal government make capital punishment and option when serious crimes are committed. Approximately 3,800 deaths row inmates languish in the nation's prisons, while around 100 excutions are carried out yearly. The number of annual excutions has been steadily rising as changes in the law and the recent supreme court decision have facilitated an increasing rate of legal death.

Capital punishment, as a sentencing possibility, was absent fron federal law for a number of years prior to its reestablishment under the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which included the possibility of capital punishment for drug-related murders. The 1994 Federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act dramatically raised the number of crimes punishable by death under federal juridiction to around sisty distinct offenses. Capital punishment can be analyzed from three quite different point of view : 1) a legal perspective, which includes constitutional issues; 2) a philosiphical, moral, and ethical perspective; and 3) via empirical analysis of data on deterrence, public opinion, and so on.

Does the capital punishment succeed in deterring potential murderes ? At first glance, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. After all, virtualy, everyone seems deterred from lwabreaking by relatively mild intimidation - for example, being towed away for illegal parking or losing one's driver's license for recklessness. How much more, common sense suggests, must potential murderers be intimidated by the threat of their own death at the excutioner's hand. In this instance, however, common sense misleads by failing to recognize that murderers differ from the rest of us in important respects.

First, there's the large category of murderers who kill in a fit of rage or passion. A barroom brawl escalates and one mankills another; in a gang fight a member of one group kills a member of another, perhaps to save face or avenge a harm; in a family quarrel a person kills a relative when things get out of hand. The list goes on and on. Such murders, of which are many, are committed not with forethought of the consequences, but in a moment of white-hot anger. Hence not even the death penalty is likely to deter these murderers. Then there's a category of so-called professional criminals, those who deliberately calculate when, where, and how to commit crimes. It's not at all clear that this type of criminal is deterred by the death penalty. In fact, if professional criminala perceive the likely punishment for nonhomicidal crimes as so overly severe, they might be encourage to kill their victim and witnesses rather than risk getting caught: Killing these people greately increases the criminals chances of getting away with their crime, and so they may not in the last be deterred by the threat of the death penalty.

Besides these kinds of potential murderers are those who seemingly have a death wish. The annals of psychiatry are replete with cases of people so emotionally disturbed that they kill in order to win the death penalty to end their tortured existence. In effect, their murderous acts are expressions of suicidal impulses. Since they lack the nerve to kill themselves, they want someone else to do it for them- in this caes, the state.

But, what case of so-called normal, nonsuicidal persons who carefully weight the risks before killing? Are these potential murderers by the death penalty? Even here, the deterrent effect of capital punishment is by no means obvious or certain. What's required is a determination of how many, if any, calculating potential murderers who are not deterred by the threat of life emprisonment would be deterred by the threat of deat. Even if such a determination is possible, it's not obvious or certain that there would be any such people at all, or much more than a small number annually.

A further complication in acessing the death p[enalty as deterrent relates not to factual questions such as the preceding, but to the moral and legal costs of deterrence. Some claim there's a basic incompatibility between the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty and due process, which refers to a constitutionally guaranteed, specific, systematic procedure of appeal. The death penalty can be deterrent, the argument goes, only if due process is sacrified. Conversly, due process can govern the inflicting of capital punishment but at the cost of deterrence. When human life is at issue - as of course it is a capital punishment cases - the courts have been undertandably scrupulous in reviewing cases for error and ensuring that the basic rights have been respected. The consequences of this process of rigorous judicial review are quite apparent: increasing delays of execution, an ever-increasing percentage of those convicted who are never excuted, and large numbers of convictions overtuned.

Some people say that capital punishment is nothing han legalized murder. Whatever crime amab has committed, he's still a human being, and every human life has inherent dignity and worth. We have to protect ourselves from them and we have to send a clear signal to other would-be murderers that society will not tolerate heinous crime. But life imprisonment without possibility of parole is sufficient punishment and deterrent. To strap a fellow human being into a chair and give him a lethal dose of gas, a lethal jolt of electricity, or a lethal injection is unworthy of a civilized society. Capital punishment should have gone the way of legalized torture and mutilition years ago. It, too, is cruel and unusual punishment, and like them it's morally unacceptable in today's world.

"Statistics show two very disturbing facts about the way capital punishment is imposed in our society. First, the poor, the underprileged, and members of minority groups are far more like to be executed than the rich, the influential, and whites. Second, the death penalty is far more like to be imposed when the victim is white than when the victim is a member of a minority group. Regardless of your high-minded principles, capital punishment shows at best a respect for affluent white life, not human life in general. Because its implementation is patently discriminatory and unjust, it must be stopped"

Though the bias mentionned is indeed unjust, it's irrelevant to the morality of capital punishment. After all, the same charges have often been made against our criminal justice systems in general. Of course, such bias shoud be rooted out wherever it exists; and of course, comparable crimes shoud bring the same punishment. But whether capital punishment is justified for the worst of crimes is one issue. Whether it's currently implemented in a justifiable way is another.

" The innocent are often convicted of crimes. As tragic as that is when the sentence is a prison term, the trajedy is far worse when the sentence is death. In the former case society can at least make some reparation for time unjustly served., but no fact is more obvious than the fact that nothing can be done for the dead. To excute even one innocent person is inexcusable, and there's no way in the world that we can rule that possibility out without abolishing the dead penalty"

" I can't deny that the execution of an innocent human being is a terrible tragedy. Nor can I deny that the possibility will always be there. That's why we require such safeguards as the automatic right of appeal after capital convictions. But given these safeguards, the possibility remains extremely slim. And as unfortunately as that slim risk is, like many other unfortunate risk it's one worth taking. The thousands of murders committed in the U.S.A each year require us to take it.

A full study of the cost and benefits involved the practice of capital punishment would not be confined solely to the question of whether it is a better deterrent or preventive of murder than imprisonment. Any thoroughgoing utilitarian approch to the death-penalty controversy would need to examine carefuully other cotts and bene fits as well, because maximizing the balance of all the social benefits over all the social costs is the sole criterion of right and wrong according to utilitarianism. Let us consider, therefore, some of the other costs and bene fits to be calculated. Clinical psychologists have presented evidence to suggest that the death penalty actually incites some persons of unstable mind murder others, either because they are afraid to take their own lives and hope that society will punish them for murder by putting them to death, or because they fancy that they, too, are killing with justification analogously to the lawful and presumably justified killing involved in capital punishment. If such evidence is sound, capital punishment can serve as a counter-preventive or even an incitement to murder; such incited murders become parts of its cost. Imprisonment, however, has not been known to incite any murders or other crimes of violence in a comparable fashion.

In sum, capital punishment, by the way that the state executes it might be scaring people in a certain sense. But leave these so bad crimes and their perpetrators running in the society without strongly be punished can be seen as a true weakness in the judicial field. Society has to play strongly its partition and make criminals out of boring polit people. Any way, there are certain mistakes that they have to be able to solve in the legal field just to reduce the way that innocents might be paying for nothing and be killed for other people.