The strongest argument against using capital punishment for retributive purposes is the dispute that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution, condemning cruel and unusual punish-ment, is used to protect the death penalty. The fallacy of this argument is that it appears to be a “red herring” argument, one that takes attention away from the facts of the case. When the constitution was drafted, capital punishment was practiced widely in this country, yet was not specified as wrong of cruel and unusual. Many of the framers of the constitution endorsed the death penalty, as did philosophers from which the constitution
draws from. John Lock went s far as to say, “…that murder is not intrinsically wrong.
Man, as he is bound to preserve himself and not quite his station willfully, by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind.” (Bedau 277)
An argument against the death penalty is the basic moral issue of conservation of human rights and humanity. The argument of retribution would be even easier to dismiss if it consisted only of a basic thirst for revenge. As stated by Bedau “Society must manifest a terrible anger in the face of a terrible crime, for nothing less will suffice to remind us of the moral order by which alone we can live as human beings.” (Bedau 121) This is a serious moral argument. Opponents of capital punishment must be willing to answer it on its own terms. They say that “… the death penalty demeans the moral order and execution is not legalized murder, nor is imprisonment legalized kidnapping, but it is the coldest, most premeditated form of homicide. It does something almost worse than lowering the state to the moral level of the criminal: it raises the criminal to the moral equality with social order.” (Haag 280) Indeed, one of the ironies of capital punishment is that it focuses attention and sympathy on the criminal.
How can murder not be immoral? Citizens under a social contract agree not to kill only because others also agree. In an attempt to try and stop the public from taking the law into their own hands, the judicial system must convince society that it is not in their best interest to murder. So how can the constitution be brought into this argument, since it makes no mention of capital punishment? These are a few of the questions that we must ask ourselves when we try to form and develop our own opinion on the subject of the death penalty.
Even though the retentions pose some interesting arguments, I myself feel that the abolitionist outlook contains much stronger support and more reasons for opposition. The first of which is the death penalty is wrong morally because it is the cruel and inhumane taking of a life. The methods by which most executions are carried out can involve physical torture. Haag states “Electrocution has on occasion caused extensive burns and needed more than one application of electric current to kill the condemned.”(Haag 137) To many opponents, capital punishment is a euphemism for legally killing people. And no one, not even the State, has the authority to play God.
Despite the moral argument concerning the inhumane treatment of the criminal, we return to the “nature” f the crime committed. Can society place an unequal weight on the tragically lost lives of murder victims on the criminal? This is not an exam question in a Thiel philosophy class, but a moral puzzle at the center of perhaps the most interesting issue facing the Supreme Court today. Punishment is meted out because of the nature of the crime, without any reference to social identity of the victim. Compassion and political calculations have combined to transform victims and their advocates into a way to sway voters by their feelings.
Beginning in California in 1987, the Supreme Court carved out a crucial exception: Neither the life of the victim or the suffering of his survivors could be a factor in any state or federal case punishable by death. The catch is that every cutback in the complex legal process has evolved to ensure that only the guilt die, increasing the chance that an innocent person will be subjected to this most irreversible and final of punishments. (Bedau 298)
The possibility of an innocent person being put to death is another factor some people have against the death penalty. According to a 1987 Stanford University survey, at least 23 Americans have been wrongly executed in the twentieth century .
In case of a mistake, the executed prisoner can not be given another chance and justice will have miscarried. In the last hundred years, there have been more than seventy- five documented cases wrongly conviction of criminal homicide. A death sentence was carried out on eight of these seventy- five individuals. Surely there are many other cases of mistaken convictions, and execution occurred and remained undocumented. A prisoner discovered to be blameless can be freed, but neither release nor compensation is possible for a corpse.
The death penalty should be abolished because it is a barbaric form of punishment, which should not be allowed in the United Sates, which is supposedly one of the most civil nations in the world. It should also be abolished not only because it is barbaric, but it also defies the U.S. Constitution, which most Americans hold sacred. In addition to this, the death penalty even if it remains legal in the U.S. would not obtain its goal. The death penalty fails its main objective and because of the reasons stated above should be abolished.
Works Cited
American Civil Liberties Union.Goher:/gopher.pipeline.com:70/00/society/
aclu/publicatios/papers/8. Briefing Paper Number 8.
Associated Press. News:death-penalty/urebo_5fn@clarinet.com. PD Chiefs:
Death Penalty Fails.
Bedau, Hugo Adam. Goher:/goher.pipeline.com:70/000society/aclu/issues/
death/case_against. The Case Against the Death Penalty
Blumstein, Alfred and Jacqueline Cohen. Deterrence and Incapacitation:
Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates.
Washington, DC., 1978. National Academy of Sciences
Van den Haag, Ernest. Punishing Criminals: Concerning a Very Old and
Painful Question. New York, NY, 1975. Basic Books, Inc.
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