Most, though not all—social scientific examinations of the death penalty in America have concluded that capital punishment has no or minimal deterrent effect on crimes such as murder. But most Americans continue to value the death penalty despite this, for two main reasons.
One is simply a desire for retribution, which stems in part from a reaction to a widespread loss of faith in the power of prisons and other institutions to rehabilitate criminals and prisons and partly from beliefs that crime rests on the free will of the criminal rather than social or biological forces beyond the criminal’s control.As William Bradford Reynolds, an official in the Reagan Justice Department, wrote,” Some crimes deserve death, and nothing else will quench our righteous anger, or vindicate our humanity, or inspire sufficiently profound respect or reverential fear of the law and the underlying moral order. Serving justice at times demands imposing the ultimate sanction” (Hickok 1991: 330).Secondly, with the end of public executions during the 1930s as a vehicle for the collective public condemnation of crime, support for capital punishment subsequently assumed a symbolic status—as a shorthand way of expressing concern about crime in general.
For most Americans, some crimes exist for which life imprisonment is an adequate punishment. Since relatively few within or outside America adhere to a complete prohibition on state killing—including times of war, in cases of crimes such as the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995—the key issue then becomes where the appropriate line is drawn.This paper favors death penalty because although a plurality of Americans favoured abolition in the mid-1960s, a steep rise in crime rates from that period—combined with urban riots and growing public concern about social breakdown and a collapse of “law and order”—helped shift opinion back to supporting capital punishment. It is good to look at both sides of the picture in drawing up one’s conclusion about the validity of death penalty.Defined as the “execution sentence for murder and other capital crimes, serious crimes or grave crimes such as murder, treason, rape and the like, the death penalty is also given for federal offenses, such as murder of a government official, kidnapping resulting to death, running a large-scale drug enterprise and treason.
” (Merriam & Webster). For those who are against death penalty, they have the following reasons for believing as such: Death penalty does not deter crime Several studies in the decades of the 1990s and 2000s dispute the notion that capital punishment, primarily death penalty, discourages criminal acts.For instance, a 1998 research study conducted for the United Nations concluded: “This research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis” (Hood 238). Similarly, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the South has repeatedly demonstrated the highest murder rate in the United States.
In 1999, collated reports from the states of the South exhibited a murder rate above the national rate.The Southern part of the United States actually accounts for the highest rate of executions against the Northeast, which reveals a 1% murder rate. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report of 2001 showed the same results as that of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Their results showed that in the United States, the highest murder rate is in the South with a 6. 7 rate per 100,000 people. In 1990, the gap between death penalty states and non-penalty states was at 4%.
By 2000, the murder rate gap of death penalty states was 35% higher than that of the other group. The murder rate gap grew to 37% by the year 2001.In 2002, the gap of the murder rates between the two groups stood at 36%. (DPIC). These studies actually indicate that non-death penalty regions have remained consistent with a low murder and homicide rate while death penalty states remain constant with a high murder and homicide rate.
Thus, executions may even increase the murder rates rather than deter crime. Criminals are more afraid of the idea of being imprisoned his entire life, with no chances of getting out rather than the death penalty. The accused and the criminals view life imprisonment as robbing and controlling their lives, which is hard for them to accept.Death penalty could be their easy way out of the miserable situation they may live in inside the prison bars.
Crime rates even shoot up in the event of executions because it makes criminals angrier and more vengeful of the society. They see a life sentence without parole as more tolerable than death penalty. Death penalty is costly for the government. To date, there are twelve states, namely, Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Hawaii, Alaska, Iowa, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont, and the District of Columbia, which prohibit death penalty.The other states of the United States of America are in still in heated debate over the issue. Crime deterrence can possibly be effective more through a crime prevention program rather than sentencing a criminal to face the death row.
More of the criminal justice money actually goes to the murder trials, appeals and death row convictions. Research indicates executions are three to six times more costly than life imprisonment. “According to a study by the New York State Defense Association, the cost of executing someone is actually, on the average, more than three times as high as keeping that person in prison for life.The higher cost is partly the result of the numerous appeals and other safeguards required to insure that an innocent person is not put to death, as well as the added costs of security on death rows and the cost of the execution itself. ” (Hintze, 4) There is a danger of sending an innocent man to his death with the death penalty law. There are also studies that report the evidently high number of wrongfully convicted people facing the death row.
68% of the 4,576 cases between 1975 and 1995 that James Leibman of the Columbia University Law School and the appellate courts reviewed were found with a serious, reversible error.Two out of three death penalty convictions were overturned on appeal, mostly due to errors by incompetent and underpaid defense attorneys or because of police & prosecutorial withholding of evidence. Thus, more and more jurors, even prosecutors, opt for a life sentence without parole than the death penalty (DPIC). The justice system is biased and unfair already and with this is the risk of sending an innocent man to his death. Sometimes, new evidences are found way after the sentence has been carried out or while the accused is waiting in the death row.For example, with the development of DNA testing, a number of convicted criminals, including those in the death row, have been exonerated.
If the accused dies before the evidences point out that he is innocent, how then will it bring back the life of the innocent person? Capital punishment cries against the principle of the legal system, which is the premise that it is better to release a guilty man than punish and convict the innocent man (Ring, 5). Almost all of the defendants facing the death penalty sentence cannot afford their own lawyers. Therefore, they just depend on the quality of the lawyers assigned to them by the state.Many of these attorneys lack experience in capital cases or are so underpaid that they fail to accurately investigate the case. A poorly represented defendant is much more likely to be convicted and given a death sentence than an accused who has his own lawyer that could provide all the means, financially and intellectually, to defend him. Death penalty undermines the value of human rights and human life.
Criminals have their rights to a fair trial, right to repent, right to plead guilty or not guilty to the crime accused of him. In an insidious kind of way, the death penalty stifles their human and constitutional rights.Long trials with numerous appeals interrupt more their desire to rest the matter. It makes the families suffer longer than they should. The act of killing the criminals does not take away the pain and hurt that the victims’ families feel.
Death penalty is also a form of revenge. It reinforces the idea that we can punish those who have wronged us, especially grave offenses. Death penalty can be seen as act of crime itself, although it is argued to be legal. Can killing ever be legal? Vengeance is never justice.
Justice is what the victims and their families seek. Death of the criminal cannot give them the justice they need.Premeditated murder is punishable by death, argue the capital punishment supporters. But isn’t death penalty also a premeditated murder? Killing the criminals, the murderers, only continue the wrong done by the murder. It does not do justice.
Indeed, as an old adage states, two wrongs don’t make a right. Yet, what explains the failure of American abolitionists sentiments of most Americans on capital punsihment? First, American courts—and the federal courts, especially, have exerted a profound influence on the capital punishment regime, making the penalty a constitutional as well as a political matter for resolution.Second, traditionalist sentiments have proven tenaciously effective in encouraging public officials from presidents to district attorneys to oppose the abolition for fear of looking “soft” on broader issues of crime, social breakdown and law and order. As an aside, the jury system itself can be viewed as a way by which the justice system gives in to collective opinion of a lay jury, who may, in certain instances, overturn the laws and set free defendants who have evidently broken the law, tempering the reason of the law with a dose of human subjective judgment.In the case of the Supreme Court, aspects of their interpretations of the Eighth Amendments and how those interpretations are made to bear on their decisions do in fact take into consideration consensus public opinion on issues regarding ethics and morality, as is demonstrated in the case Roper versus Simmons decided on by the Supreme Court on March 1, 2005 (US Supreme Court 1).
Alternatives to Death PenaltyThe Death Penalty Information Center reported in 1993 that “Polls conducted in the recent years in California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Virginia and West Virginia all concluded that people prefer various alternative sentences to death penalty. ” A May 2004 Gallup Poll found that a growing number of Americans support a sentence of life without parole rather than the death penalty for those convicted of murder. Gallup found that 46% of respondents favor life imprisonment over the death penalty, up from 44% in May 2003.During that same time frame, support for capital punishment as an alternative fell from 53% to 50%.
(DPIC) The primary alternative chosen by the anti-death penalty advocates is the life sentence without parole. Moreover, the suggestion is to require the sentenced person to work with dignity within the prison bars. Part of their earnings will then be the payment for the cost of their stay in prison and the other part will go to a restitution fund that will help the victims of crimes and the families of the murder victims.
