The United States political system divides the country into two main parties that, in general, disagree on most prominent issues.  One of the few topics of discussion that the majority of the country is actually able to agree on, however, is the practice of capital punishment, or the death penalty.  Almost everyone has a reasonably well argued stance on the issue, whether it is in full support or the belief that it should be rid of completely.  In this paper I will outline two arguments; one arguing for the death penalty and one detailing why the practice should be abandoned.

One of the main ideas in support of the death penalty is that it deters future would-be murderers from actually following through when they realize that their life would be at risk. The author of an article on “deathpenatlycurriculum.com” finds, as his or her bottom line, that we need the death penalty in order to deter murders and other unlawful crimes.  Below are the steps leading to his or her conclusion.

First, our society and many others use punishment in order to decrease the frequency of unlawful action. For clarification, punishment can be prison time, monetary fines, probation or even a simple warning if that is what the situation calls for as a repercussion for a committed crime against the state.  Furthermore, unlawful action can be generalized to mean anything outlawed in the U.S. Code, be it trespassing on private property to assault or murder.  Of course, with these differing levels of unlawful actions, or crimes, comes differing levels of punishment.  Similarly, the harsher the punishment is, the more effective the punishment is as a deterrent.  Because we, as a society, do not want the worst crimes to be committed often, we must utilize a very harsh punishment in order to be an effective deterrent. While staying in accordance with the law, to take someone’s life is the harshest punishment an individual can suffer.  Therefore to take someone’s life as punishment for an unlawful act, the death penalty, is the most effective deterrent for criminals. Further evidence to the deterrence effect is a study by Isaac Ehrlich in 1973 that found that for every execution, seven lives afterwards were saved.

A reasonable person would agree that the most heinous crime should be the crime that society has the most interest in preventing.  Furthermore, society would likely agree that to take a life of someone else is the most heinous of crimes. It follows then, that the punishment with the most effective deterrent effect, the death penalty, should be the punishment given to those that commit the most heinous crimes. Therefore, our society needs the death penalty as the form of punishment in order to deter murders.

In 2014, Nick Gillespie wrote an article for The Daily Beast online news site titled “Why the Death Penalty Needs to Die.”  He is part of the Independent political party and is very vocal in his belief that the death penalty is not effective in any way.  The bottom line of his article is that because of its ineffectiveness and its ability to destroy innocent lives, the death penalty needs to be abandoned. In order to arise at this conclusion, Nick uses sub-arguments that utilize implicit assumptions in order to be convincing and then ultimately uses the concluding sentence to tie the arguments together.

Gillespie’s arguments are quite simple and easy to believe without looking at the cited data or original reports. In order to argue that the death penalty is not a deterrent, he writes “…with fully 88% of criminal justice experts responding to a poll saying the death penalty does not act as a deterrent of murder…” In order to accept this as fact, we must assume that if the polled experts represent all the entire expert community. Furthermore, we must assume that if the vast majority of criminal justice experts agree on something, they cannot be wrong.  Therefore, it follows necessarily that, the death penalty does not have any impact on future murderers as a deterrent.

Gillespie’s second argument deals with the issue of such a harsh punishment being inflicted too soon and effecting innocent individuals and families.  He writes that “The Innocence Project has documented that at least 18 innocent people, who have served a combined 229 years in prison before being exonerated, have been saved from possible execution over the past 15 years.” This means, clearly, that there have been more than zero innocent people wrongly effected by the mental, physical and monetary stress of a death penalty trial and death row.  While it is a subtopic debated by some, in order to accept this argument, an individual must accept that even one innocent person wrongfully sentenced to death is unacceptable. If the previous qualification is accepted, then it is clear that an unacceptable number of innocent people have been condemned to death row and everything that accompanies this sentencing. Were there no death penalty, the defendants may have had more money to hire a better lawyer because of the extreme costs of a death penalty case and the jury may have been less likely to convict an innocent person out of fear of the stigma that accompanies a death penalty case.

After presenting these two arguments, Gillespie believes he is able to conclude that because it is ineffective and wrongfully effects too many innocent people, the death penalty must be abandoned.

We, as a society and as a species, use negative punishment on a regular basis, which is taking away something positive, such as freedom, as repercussions for a certain behavior.  Should an individual commit a robbery, they will likely be sentenced to a certain stay in prison. The likelihood of being sent to prison is, often times, the reason why people do not commit such a crime.  With that being said, the idea that the death penalty would serve as a deterrent is not an unreasonable concept. Unfortunately there are too many contrasting studies finding contrary outcomes for there to be substantial evidence favoring either side. Even the studies that are attempting to prove the same thing, that the death penalty is effective in deterring murders after an execution, display extremely different results.  The studies that I have seen have ranged from saving around 1.5 lives for every execution to saving 18 lives per known execution.  I believe that, with how severe a punishment death is, if the penalty is not clearly proving to have the desired deterring effect it should not be practiced.

Furthermore, I do not believe that an innocent life is worth the lives of ten murderers. A death penalty trial does not get presented to a perfect jury that is willing to look past what may not have happened in order to see the truth.  By this I mean that, based on the unlikelihood that the defendant is actually innocent, the jury will likely begin to form an opinion before the case has even began. A prime example of this comes from the movie 12 Angry Men when one of the jury members, when asked why he believes the defendant to be guilty, responds, “It’s hard to put into words. I just think he’s guilty. I thought it was obvious from the word, ‘Go’.” In my opinion, to punish an innocent person is one of the single worst things to do as a person or as a nation. Many people would argue that if they must one innocent life in order to clear the streets of 10 murderers, they would because of the belief that it is an acceptable ratio. However, I wholeheartedly disagree and I think that more people would too if they themselves were the innocent ones that had to be sacrificed for the rest of the society.

References

“Deterrence (In Support of the Death Penalty).” Death Penalty Curriculum. Michigan State University, 2000. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.

Gillespie, Nick. “Why the Death Penalty Needs to Die.” The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 31 July 2014. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.