A Look At The Death Penalty Critical Thinking Samples

The argument under discussion is a refutation of the death penalty, on the basis of several reasons. One is the assertion that the desire behind the application of capital punishment is one of revenge. As much as we want to dress up the death penalty as the balancing of some sort of scales of justice, the basic truth is that we want someone to pay for the crime that has been committed. This is the basic thrust of the argument – that when we take on the role of the hangman as a society, we actually pick up the same weapon that the person we are about to execute picked up to end another life. The difference is only in the party sanctioning the crime; it remains wrong to kill, even if the person we are killing has done the same thing to someone else.
One tactic the argument does masterfully is call into question the objections that someone might raise to it before going into its own reasons. The example is a particularly loathsome character, a racist white man who dragged a black man behind his truck until the black man’s body literally tore apart from the impact with the roads. If one were to pick out a “poster boy” for supporting executions, surely it would be this racist who was cruel and heartless in his application of his own personal death penalty on his victim. The author then moves into the question of balance: after all, a white man killed a black man. Should the white man not die as well, which would lend a sort of equity to the process?
This sort of thinking has not worked since the institution of the Code of Hammurabi, which taught that “eye for an eye” justice was the way to go. Under this system, thieves lost their hands so they could no longer steal. People who lusted after women had their eyes gouged out. If you killed someone, you were going to be killed in return. The purpose, of course, was to discourage people from breaking the law. The majority of people are not going to commit a wrong act if they know that revenge will be carried out on them in the same way. The issue comes with the balancing of risk and reward in the mind of the lawbreaker. For one thing, the probability that one will be caught for what one has done is never 100 percent. So there is a chance that the perpetrator will get away with the crime. For another thing, the reward comes in the quenching of a passion of some sort that has been bubbling within the perpetrator. In the case of theft, the passion could be kleptomania, it could be the value of the item to steal, or it could be the sort of poverty that motivates people to go out and steal because there is no other way to buy what they need, at least not in their minds. So the reward outweighs the risk of capture, in part because capture and punishment are longer-term concepts than the idea of the reward, which would be immediate.
Initially, capital punishment was the remedy for a number of crimes. If you read A Tale of Two Cities, for example, you learn that in the England of Charles Dickens you would feel the hangman’s noose if you committed murder. However, you could also feel it just for petty theft. There were not a lot of sentencing guidelines in those days. Instead, you basically got the punishment that the judge felt that you should get, and there was not an appeals court system like there is today. So there was a lot of room for error, particularly in the absence of such modern crime-detection tools as fingerprint analysis and DNA analysis.
Another argument against the death penalty is the economic disparity among perpetrators and how that disparity leads to a variety in legal outcomes. Someone who has committed premeditated murder should face the death penalty, according to the law, no matter whether he can afford a team of lawyers or has to rely on the services of the public defender. There are far too many instances in which a perpetrator ends up behind bars – or even riding the needle – because he simply lacks the resources to afford decent legal representation. There are several organizations that will take up the cases of people on Death Row on a pro bono basis and analyze them, but even one execution of an innocent person is one too many for our society to stand.
That brings us to the final argument, namely that if there is even a possibility for a sliver of an error in determining guilt or innocence, then capital punishment should be off the table. We as a society do not want people taking up weapons and ending the lives of others for whatever reason they see fit; the possibility of our criminal justice system ending the life of an innocent person robs our system of its moral high ground and lowers it to the same level as any other murderer.
This argument, in total, takes a positive view of what society could become rather than focusing on the negative aspects of human nature. After all, if you spend any time in a kindergarten class, you are not going to see any children who have the goal of growing up to become a murderer, or who want to kill someone later in life. There might be someone who is having an unpleasant day, but no small children aspire to grow up and become murderers. Over time, the forces of anger, helplessness and frustration combine to take the hope out of people, and it is then that the possibility of crime occurs to them.
As a result, people caught under that collection of unpleasant emotions end up finding themselves moving toward murder as an option. It might involve a spouse whom they need out of the way, for one reason or another; it might involve a store clerk who simply refuses to hand over the till. A society that works to instill hope cannot drive all of the violence away. However, it can go a long way toward making sure that the number of violent crimes drops significantly. That is much more effective than capital punishment as a deterrent. As the example of history shows, capital punishment has not stopped crime. What has stopped crime is when people have opportunities and hope in life. There are few people as optimistic as kindergarten students (as long as they have eaten and had their nap). I would never argue that we remain that naïve; I would, however, argue that we should find ways to remain that hopeful, so that murder remains far from our minds.