Punishment method that should be completely forgotten in new era is death penalty. We live in modern society where values such as tolerance and understanding are greatly appreciated. Capital punishment is exactly the opposite practice that mocks to these contemporary values. It is very aggressive, immoral, inappropriate punishment that breaks persons fundamental right to life. I will try to explain my point of view in the further sections of this paper.
Execution is an aggressive act but it also leaves aggressive effects on members of the society. Supporting this way of punishment means that we embrace violence as a method to raise our children and to solve social causes. It surely prevents the criminal to commit a crime again, but this goal can be accomplished by other means such as life sentence. There are many researches conducted by psychologists and sociologists which showed that intimidation by death penalty doesn’t result in decreasing the crime rate, especially when it comes to expressive criminal acts (spontaneous, caused by emotions). They proved that murder rate increases after executions. These studies also showed that murder rates mostly depend on other factors such as poverty and racial migrations (Wolpin, Kenneth I.,1978).
The avarage time period in the US that is needed to convict and later to execute criminals is evelen and a half years. During that time, lawyers and court expences are usually paid by public funds. The studies showed that costs in capital punishment are higher from non-capital cases for one to two milion dollars. This means that other types of punishments are much more economic that death penalty (Scott Turow, 2004). But, how what is the price of a person who has been killed by a serial murder, and can that be measured with the quantity of money that is spent?
In the past, there were numerous cases where innocent people were sentenced to death. Some of them were fortunate enough to live the DNA analysis and to be released in the light of new evidences. However, they still spent years of their lives in prison. There are those who were executed and during whose life DNA evidence wasn’t available and whose cases were under suspicion. Now we can just wonder if they were really guilty or not. It is obvious that there is something wrong with the system. I honestly believe that convicting an innocent person to death penalty is tremendously injustice and is enough of a reason to abolish it. Also the problem of our law system is that someone who has money can get away with criminal act, simply because he or she can hire the best lawyer. In cases where people were sentenced to death usually the state assigned lawyers (Stephen B. Bright, 2004). This meant that the destiny of the accused was in the hands of their lawyer. In those states that have no public defender offices, the accused person is defended by a lawyer who is paid very low and the cases of this kind are usually quite demanding. The question is: will the accused person be well represented in the court under these circumstances? Journalists who investigated these cases found out that fourth of those who were sentenced to death were represented by lawyers who were later suspended or convicted for a crime (Stephen B. Bright, 2004).
I think that believing in retributive justice is connected to low education, authoritarianism, dogmatism and conservatism. We should fight for moral evolution, democratization and for building a non-violent society.
On the other hand, the question that arises from this is: are we capable of building a society where everyone is treated in the same manner? Are our prisons large enough to accept that number of people who deserve to be sentenced to death but we as a state see that as inhumane thing? Has anyone thought of better idea to punish criminal and can be they treated equally as common thieves?
Another argument against capital punishment is that there are people who are extremely aggressive due to mental illnesses, drug problems or who were abused during their childhood. If someone commits a crime in a psychotic episode that means that he could not anticipate consequences of his acts or was truly frightened for his life (in cases of paranoid schizophrenia) and believed that he was defending himself. Wouldn’t it be more justice to treat that person than to sentence him to death? In these cases a person is not guilty for being ill or mentally disabled; therefore it would be wrong to sentence him to death.
Someone might say that these people have predispositions to do some sort of criminal act and even it would be better for them, and their parents to die. But, can that be putted in the frames of modern democracy? Are these people the casualties of society? And what about victims, the innocent people who were murdered and tortured? What to say to their relatives and loved ones? How can a society recognize who is predisposed for such hideous crimes, and prevent him or she at the very start.?
Jeffrey H. Reiman talked against death penalty implying that it is a method to punish someone for murder by doing physically the same thing. If this kind of punishment is justified than it would mean that it would be justified to rape someone who is a rapist or to torture a person who tortured someone else. (Jeffrey H. Reiman, 1981). These draconian punishments are unacceptable in so called modern society so why would death sentence be. Modern society cares for individuals, is sensitive to differences among people and is interested in the causes of behavior, so how could it allow for execution to live.
Finally, I have to say that in my opinion death penalty is morally contradictor because we first claim that life is the most precious belonging of a human being, and afterwards we say that we can take that away from him. Also, capital punishment protects one men’s life by taking away another life. I don’t see any logic in that. Even from a religious point of view, death penalty has no sense because it disables atonement of sins. Real punishment would be to live with guilt and death liberates criminals from guilt. Even if we look at the death sentence as revenge for committed crime it has no sense at all because we don’t know the real nature of death. As far as we know death could even be a reward.
References:
Jeffrey H. Reiman (1985), Justice, Civilization and Death Penalty : Answering van Den Haag, Phylosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 2, 115-148.
Hugo Adam Bedau (2004), Debating the Death Penalty: Should America Have Capital Punishment? The Experts on Both Sides Make Their Best Case, New York, Oxford University Press
Stephen B. Bright, Why the United States Will Join the Rest of the World in Abandoning Capital Punishment, a chapter in DEBATING THE DEATH PENALTY (Hugo Bedau & Paul Cassell, eds. 2004).
Wolpin, Kenneth I.(1978), An Economic Analysis of Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1894-1967, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 86.
