capital punishment
Why Capital Punishment Should be Abolished Unlike popular belief, the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to criminals. As stated by Alfred Blumstein, "Expert after expert and study after study has shown the lack of correlation between the treat of the death penalty and the occurrence of violent crimes." (Blumstein 68) Isaac Ehrlich's study on the limiting effects of capital punishment in America reveals this to the public. The study spans twenty-five years, from 1957 till 1982, and shows that in the first year the study was conducted, there were 8060 murders and 6 executions. However, in the last year of the study there were 22,520 murders committed and only 1 execution performed. (Blumstein 54) This clearly shows that many violent criminals are not afraid of the capital punishment. Abolitionists believe the offenders should be required to compensate the victim's family with the offender's own income from employment or community service. There is no doubt that someone c!an do more alive than dead. By working, the criminal inadvert-ently "pays back" society and also their victim and/or victim's family. There is no reason for the criminal to receive any compensation for the work they do, because money is of no jail time. Th
II Malaria Project.(Bedau 193) "An inestimable amount of people were directly helped by Leopold and Loeb, Both of tem made a conscious commitment to atone their crimes by serving others."(Bedau 217) The most widely used form of execution has been electrocution. With this method of executing a prisoner, the individual is strapped to a chair along with electrodes attached all over the body. The executioner then proceeds to "throw the switch" sending vast amounts of electricity flowing throughout the prisoner. During this period, the prisoners flesh burns and the body shakes violently from the overdose of electricity. When it is all over, smoke is often seen coming from the head of the corpse. (Ernest Van den Haag 135) Officials often defend this punishment as not being cruel and unusual, but how can they defend the opinion in the case of John Evans who was executed by electrocution in 1983? According to witnesses at the scene of the death of Mr. Evans, he was given three charge! tion, condemning cruel and unusual punish-ment, is used to protect the death penalty. The fallacy of this argument is that it appears to be a "red herring" argument, one that takes attention away from the facts of the case. When the constitution was drafted, capital punishment was practiced widely in this country, yet was not specified as wrong of cruel and unusual. Many of the framers of the constitution endorsed the death penalty, as did philosophers from which the constitution draws from. John Lock went s far as to say, "...that murder is not intrinsically wrong. Man, as he is bound to preserve himself and not quite his station willfully, by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind." (Bedau 277) An argument against the death penalty is the basic moral issue of conservation of human rights and humanity. The argument of retribution would be even easier to dismiss if it consisted only of a! is coul
Some common words found in the essay are:
Isaac Ehrlich's, Donald Harding, Bedau Society, Associated Press, John Evans, Leopold Loeb, John Lock, United Constitu, Raymond Landry, Crime Century, death penalty, capital punishment, cruel unusual, victim's family, method execution, gas chamber, method executing, violent criminals,
Approximate Word count = 1332
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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