My personal belief is that there is no need for capital punishment in our society. Advocates say that capital punishment is needed in order to deter future criminals, but this is not entirely the case. Research has shown that capital punishment, as a deterrent, has no positive or negative effect. An influential student of the deterrence question, Thorsten Sellin, conducted a study that would attempt to determine the effect of capital punishment on future crime. He studied the homicide rates in contiguous states, some with and some without the death penalty, on the assumption that these states were as alike as possible in character of population, social and economic conditions, etc. His conclusion was that the death penalty had no effect on the murder rate (Sellin, 63).

This is not to say that the study performed by Sellin was perfect, for it did contain flaws. In his atte

The third point offered by Ezorsky is what is called the moral or educative effect of the criminal law. She further states that punishment is not only the artificial creation of a risk of unpleasant consequences, but also a means of expressing social disapproval. Again, I see another potential problem in her analysis. Those individuals, who commit crimes, many times, care not about what society thinks of them. They do what they do because of social environments, insanity, and other reasons that we do not know about. Those who do care what society thinks of them would have been rehabilitated in the penal system anyway.

The above description highlights the theory that fear bears, at least in some form, influence on individuals who commit a crime. They realize that they have committed a shameful act, and the incident acts as a moral revelation. Most criminals, before arrest, do not think of themselves as criminals, but that notion of breaking the law finally hits home when they are caught. Even if they are not prosecuted or given any form of punishment, they will feel shameful because of the aspect of detection.

In essence, the reasoning behind RLT is in its objective, which is to distribute harm toward the guilty rather than toward the innocent.

Thirdly, how well does RLT answer the question of "Why punish?" We maintain that if an individual commits wrong against another, or to society as a whole, then it is morally preferable to punish that individual. Retributive liability allows the same autonomy as retributivism (our own voluntary acts determine what harm can be inflicted on us), but harm is inflicted only if the result is savings in harm to victims.

Berns, Walter, For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1979.

Ezorsky makes three points in her definition of general deterrence. Her first point is the need to take into account the danger of generalization. Distinction must be carefully made in the different types of offenses because they vary in motivation. Any discussion of general deterrence must be in the contexts of norms and an analysis of the deviations from those norms. The second point of her definition is that people react differently. She divides the population into three distinct groups: (1) the good, law-abiding citizens who do not require the threat of law to live by the rules set by society; (2) the criminal group--those who fear the law, but not to the extent that they do not break the law; and (3) the potential criminals who would have broken the law had it not been for the threat of punishment.

Another view of capital punishment is offered by Jerry Cederblom. He acknowledges the two main

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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)