Capital Punishment

A detailed Summary of Capital Punishment

How does a person define capital punishment and what constitutes a crime in which capital punishment should be the penalty? According to Dr. Pomerleau, capital punishment is the legal killing or execution of a convicted felon by the state. Ernest Van den Haag's article is in favor of the death penalty, whereas Stephen Nathanson's is not. Van den Haag's article, In Defense of the Death Penalty, is more accurate because of the five defenses: consensus, cruelty, unusual, unavoidable capriciousness, and avoidable capriciousness, whereas in Nathanson's article An Eye for an Eye: The Morality of Punishing By Death, Nathanson disputes against the argument from desert, which is that many people believe that murderers deserve to die and therefore the state ought to execute them, instead of two factors: 1.) People who commit murder do not deserve to die, and 2.) Even if people who commit murder deserve to die, it is wrong for the state to execute them.

Van den Haag agrees with the death penalty. His first argument stems from the definitions of the five terms stated above, beginning with consensus. According to van den Haag, polls suggest that today most people would vote for the death penalty (van den Haag 838).

Consensus of the general population should not be ignored and furthermore, this country is a democracy run by the general population so its views should be carried out through governmental actions. The next term van den Haag used is cruel. Cruel is understood to mean excessive, punitive without, or beyond, a rational-utilitarian purpose (van den Haag 838). The death penalty is not cruel because the end result is deterrence. The death penalty is used mainly for people who have committed capital crimes, which in most cases is a murder. If legally killing a human being would deter any other humans from committing the same crime then justice has been served. Justice requires the punishment to be proportioned to!

uilty goes free while the innocent goes to jail, or in worse scenarios, gets the death penalty. It is wrong for that person to be punished for a crime he/she did not commit, but if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, human activities, including those of the penal system with all its punishments, are morally justified.

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Keeping those terms in mind, is the death penalty morally just and/or useful? The answer is yes, the death penalty is not only just, but is also useful. Deterrence is the ultimate goal for using the death penalty therefore it is useful. The death penalty is just because in most cases is it used on the guilty instead of the on the innocent. Van den Haag states that if the death penalty is morally just it remains just in each case in which it is applied (840). That means it is just to punish the guilty and unjust to punish the innocent. Therefore, the death penalty is just and useful. Of course, there will always be the problem of misdistribution between the guilty and the innocent, but that is because human error is unavoidable. In a court case, for example, the guilty may have been so intelligent as to frame another person for the crime. The person accused did not commit the crime but all the facts and evidence prove that he/she did, in fact, commit the crime.

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Approximate Word count = 1413
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History