Capitalistic Punishment
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"...so says the Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Throughout history, different societies have incorporated this principle into their legal and cultural lives. In today's context in the United States, this traditional form of retributional theory has taken the form of state-sponsored capital punishment. The infamous "death penalty," legalized nationally in 1976 by Supreme Court decision, has resulted in the execution of over five hundred convicted (rightly and wrongly) murderers in the past quarter century. In the minds of advocates, the ultimate penalty has swiftly and justly incapacitated killers as well as effectively deterred future murderers. On the contrary, both common sense and empirical evidence reveal capital punishment to be inefficient, ineffective, and unjust; therefore, the death penalty should be abolished in the United States. Most of those who espouse capital punishment laud it for its supposed deterrence effect; that is, its alleged ability to intimidate would-be criminals into abstaining from murder for fear of the fatal penalty. According to statistics, however, no such effect is apparent. "Since the death penalty was reinstated
Another questionable characteristic associated with the death penalty is the fallacy that it is the most efficient method of retribution. Surely, executing a convicted murderer would be the most cost-effective manner to incapacitate him or her. This might be true if the American justice system were structured differently, but according to studies "the death penalty is not now, nor has it ever been, a more economical alternative to life imprisonment" (Spangenberg 47). And furthermore, in The Death Penalty in America, Bedau cites research that shows states like Florida, New York, Kansas, Maryland, and North Carolina discovered that the implementation of capital punishment dramatically increased penal costs --mostly at the expense of taxpayers. The high price of the death penalty can be attributed to various factors: the lengthiness and cost of capital cases as well as the ensuing litigation and appeals after a death sentence has been declared. A solution may be to eradicate some of these safeguards, but in doing so, Americans would be haphazardly playing with their Constitutional right to a fair trial. Paramount to contradicting the Constitution, doing so could endanger the lives of innocent American citizens. Endangering the lives of innocent American citizens should not be publicly, or legally, sponsored. This is, however, precisely what the death penalty is doing. The implementation of capital punishment has often in the past, and continues to be,
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Approximate Word count = 991
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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