The tittle “The Death Penalty: Justice for None” the author provokes a feeling to the readers of compassion and empathy making it seem like the death penalty is completely ignorant and wrong no matter what the consequence of the criminal is. The authors opinion about the death penalty is that the death penalty in the united states shouldn’t even be considered an option because it is cruel and unjust.…
It is a personal choice to argue from so called moral grounds – but saying “it’s a personal choice” doesn’t lend one’s position inherent validity, for arguing from a secondary definition of morality can be a tricky business when your secondary definition of morality is at odds with and ignores the natural law that governs universal moral norms. To argue from a secondary position of morality as you implied you define it lends greater moral weight to the life of the murderer than to the lives of his victims…
Retribution is the theory that the mandate to pay an offender back for his or her wrongdoing (pg. 6 Cullen). Conservatives lean in favor of this approach while liberals favor what is called “just deserts.” The difference between the two is that retribution is has the goal of ensuring that the offender endures the pain they have caused. Just desert want the offender to suffer no more than the pain caused. They wish to see that justice is served but not more than that which is truly deserved. One punishment that is considered retribution rather than rehabilitative is the death penalty. The argument that this punishment is more retribution is that the offender should suffer the same harm to which his or her inflicted on the victim. They see the…
Today, the death penalty is an issue that has raised many questions in regards to its morality. Many people believe that the death penalty is immoral for a number of factors, some of which being the execution of innocents, the arbitrary application of the death penalty, and the racial and economic discrimination with the system. Many others believe that the death penalty is moral, for it gives people what they deserve, the criminals were fully aware of the consequences that may fall upon them, and that justice is being served for the victims and families of the victims still suffering from the actions of the criminal. In this paper I will argue that from a Deontological standpoint, the death penalty is morally just. To do this, I will first describe the basics of the theory of Deontology in general, so that you, the reader, can begin to understand some of the fundamental beliefs that Kant, the father of Deontology,…
Capital punishment is a punishment that results in death usually caused by capital crimes or capital offenses. It is commonly referred to as the death sentence. According to an article “Buzzle” not all countries accept capital punishment but there are still a lot of states who do (par.1). Capital punishment has been around for thousands of years, this punishment is said to have helped keep crime level down and alter the minds of future criminals to prevent them from committing atrocious crimes such as: murder, terrorism, and in some situations aggravated kidnapping.…
In his article Why The Death Penalty Needs To Die, Gillespie mentions that in California alone, $4 billion dollars was spent on administering death penalty cases between 1980 and 2012. That is a lot of money that was wasted on something so useless. In Here's Why We Need to Kill the Death Penalty, Senator Daylin Leach states how unaffordable it is to process, try, and carry out a death penalty sentencing. So much money is spent on the death penalty. Billions and billions of dollars are spent just to have the death penalty. The country is in debt enough as it is. The average case costs about $740,000. With cases that aim for the death penalty it costs around $1.26 million. It costs $90,000 dollars more in taxpayer money to manage a prisoner on…
“We’re only human, we all make mistakes." The death penalty has been the highest form of criminal punishment in the American judicial system since the 13 colonies. There has been many forms of the death penalty like hanging, stoning, drowning, burning, beheading, gasing, electrocution, and injection. The taking of a man's life as punishment for criminal behavior is wrong. The moral injustice of murder, the cruelty of execution, and the death of innocent men are all concerns that make the death penalty wrong. The government should abolish the death penalty in order to observe morality, end cruelty, and protect innocent men. What is the death penalty?…
Death penalty is the punish meant of execution, administered to someone legally convicted of a capital crime and there are twenty-two countries in the world that still impose the death penalty for capital crimes, the United states is one of them. If you are charged with capital homicide, and the jury of twelve of your peers proclaims, “We find the defendant guilty as charged”(Condenaststore). Then it is simple, you are going to forfeit your life, so abolishing the death penalty or there’s no coming back from the grave.…
James Eagan Holmes was described as a quiet, standoffish, 24-year-old graduate student from San Diego who had earned a bachelor's degree in neuroscience in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside. Holmes then enrolled at the University of Colorado in June of 2011, taking graduate courses in neuroscience at the university's campus in Denver. He later dropped out of a doctoral program at the University's medical school, where he had been doing research.…
The death penalty is an extremely controversial topic in America, and people usually shy away from it, but speaking about controversial topics can help us come close to actually find solutions. This exercise was conducted in my survey of law class in which, we had gone over several homicide cases in which the criminal received the death penalty. In the end of the lesson, our teacher asked a simple question “raise your hand if you believe in the death penalty”. I was appalled to see that more than half believed it was worth it. In my mind it was clear that even though that person could have murdered another human being, we have no jurisdiction to kill them, and we would be no better as civilized being if we killed him.…
Steve Earle is just one of the many protesters of the death penalty, stating “. . . The death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I am killing somebody.” His quote is one of many negative views people have on the death penalty. The death penalty is based around the idea that it is acceptable to execute someone for killing. However, this is disagreed on by many Americans. In a survey from the PEW Research Center, results show that 56% of Americans still support the death penalty, compared to the 62% in 2011, and the 78% in the 1996 survey. The percent of people that still support the death penalty is at an all-time low, and is drastically dropping. This is an almost surefire indication that shows society wants the death penalty to be abolished. Although the death penalty is still an option in some states, it should be discontinued because of the immorality of execution, the staggering costs, and the potential injustices such as false execution.…
While evil gives us the right to punish the wrongdoer with retribution, does it follow that we should act on this right? Death penalty system is recognized as the world's most severe punishment for offenders because it has a direct denial of the right to live of criminals, and depriving prisoner’s opportunity to go back compensate the victims. Reiman's article "against the death penalty," he begins with a brief summary of his ideas to death the four positions, and then he goes into more detail for each person. The first point he made that: "Although the death penalty is a just punishment for some murderers, it is unfair to punish the perpetrators less stringent (reduced to a certain limit)." In his first premise, he shows how the most accepted…
die because they murdered someone that's why we have the life sentence or high security prisons. I don’t understand why the government should have decision on who should live and who shall perish . It's a very unusual and cruel punishment and the United States should retire using it.…
Today I came across a discussion on the death penalty on a progressive Facebook page. The post was in favor of execution, which was interesting to me because this is not the progressive position. In fact progressive position is staunchly opposed to the death penalty.…
Sophia Snyder has had a long history of battling with the mental illness of schizophrenia. One afternoon, she drowned her four young children in a bathtub. She went on trial for capital murder charges and all of the mental health experts agreed that she suffered from schizophrenia when she had committed the murders but they all disagreed that the schizophrenia left her unable to know the difference between right and wrong. The state of Olympus implements and uses the M’Naghten test for insanity which requires the defendant to prove that she did not know the quality and nature of her acts and did not know in acting such a way was wrong. Since the mental health experts…