The Death Penalty
Overview
Death penalty is described as the capital punishment for murder and other major crimes. Senate or any state administration may regulate the death penalty. The Supreme Court has administered that the death penalty is not a violation of the Eighth Amendment in itself for regarding ban on unusual and cruel punishment, but this amendment form certain procedural features concerning when a jury may practice the death penalty and how it must be implied. The Supreme Court also decided that people who are mentally retarded should be exempted from the death penalty because they are mentally handicapped (cornell.edu).
Pros and Cons
The pros of the death penalty in a moral aspect are that it respects human dignity by dealing with the defendant as a free moral character. The death penalty respects a defendant as someone who is able to control his destiny no matter how good or bad it will be, and it does not deal with him as someone with no sense of morality.
Morally, the cons of the death penalty involves the question that surrounds it in America, which is whether the accused of violent crime deserves to die or whether federal and state governments deserve to sentence to death those who are imprisoned. The death penalty is imposed in a criminal justice system that will treat you better if you are wealthy and guilty if you are poor and innocent.
Constitutionally, the pros of the death penalty involve the fact that throughout our history, whenever a process of execution has been faced in court as unusual and cruel, the court denies this process. The society nevertheless progressively moves to more humane process of implementing capital punishment.
The cons of the death penalty in the constitutional outlook involve the fact that death is uncommonly severe punishment, uncommon in its pain, in its enormity, and its finality. The serious constitutional affliction in the death punishment is that it deals with members of the society inhumanely, as objects to be played with and discarded.
Deterrence
Evidently, the society tells us that the death penalty will prevent murder. Everyone fears death so much. As a result, nothing will prevent the criminal than the scare of death. Criminals evidently prefer life in prison than the death penalty because life in prison is less deterrent than the death penalty and this will not prevent murderers from doing crimes. Therefore, deterrence must be implemented in the form of death penalty in order protect citizens and prevent murder incidents in the future (procon.org, 2009).
Rationale why the death penalty is considered unusual and cruel
Nationally, police chiefs position the death penalty last in their list for effective crime prevention. The police officials do not consider the death penalty performs as a deterrent to murder, and they estimate it as one of the most ineffective practices of taxpayer dollars in reducing crime (deathpenaltyinfo.org).
Based on the statement of the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, there is no reliable evidence that the death penalty prevents crime more efficiently than life imprisonment. States, which have death sentence laws, do not have lower murder rates or crime rates than states that implement it. Additionally, states that have eliminated the death penalty show no major changes in either murder or crime rates. The death sentence law has no deterrent result. Cases that every execution deters a definite number of crimes have been carefully questioned by the research of social science (procon.org, 2009).
References
Cornell Univdersity Law School. (n.d.). Death Penalty | Wex Legal Dictionary / Encyclopedia | LII / Legal Information Institute. Retrieved from http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/death_penalty
Death Penalty Information Center. (n.d.). Public Opinion About the Death Penalty | Death Penalty Information Center. Retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/public-opinion-about-death-penalty
ProCon. (2009). Top 10 Pros and Cons - Death Penalty - ProCon.org. Retrieved from http://deathpenalty.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002000
