Capital Punishment Supporters example essay topic

Killing Is Never Justified Capital punishment, by definition, is the legal killing of an individual. Now, how someone could be killed legally when murder is universally recognized as a violent and serious crime. It is irrevocable, meaning that once an inhabitant of death row pays the ultimate price. The death penalty is corporal punishment in its most severe form and is considered to be the ultimate form of retribution for those who have committed society's most heinous crimes, including rape and murder. Ultimately, Capital punishment is wrong due to the likelihood of error, the unjust racial allocation, and the violation of constitutional rights. However, many people believe that capital punishment is morally correct and preserves human dignity.

Primarily, until human judgment is proved to be infallible, capital punishment will always carry a likelihood of error along with it. As Hugo Adam Bedau said in his writings, "Since 1900, in this country, there have been on the average of four cases per year in which an entirely innocent person was convicted of murder. Scores of these people have been sentenced to death" (Bedau 8). Considering that four completely innocent citizens had been sentenced to death, in a period of twenty years about eighty innocent people would have been wrongly sentenced to death.

Human judgment and the justice system in which the United States of America is based on will never be perfect; there will always be a margin of error. Because of the infallibility of human nature, a few people each year are accused of crimes in which they did not even commit. Should innocent citizens be placed on death row and sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit? Because the justice system will never be perfect and mistakes are inevitably going to be made, capital punishment is not a just solution, especially for the innocent.

Furthermore, many innocent convicts have been executed, while others have been lucky enough to prove their innocence in time. Subsequently, according to the Atlanta Weekly newspaper, In Georgia in 1975, Earl Charles was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. A surviving victim of the crime erroneously identified Charles as the gunman; her testimony was supported by a jail-house informant who claimed he heard Charles confess. Incontrovertible alibi evidence, showing that Charles was in Florida at the very time of the crime, eventually establishes his innocence-but not until he had spent more than three years under his death sentence. His release owed largely to his mother's unflagging efforts (Atlanta Weekly, May 30, 1982). This man served three years under death row before his innocence was proved and he could become a normal citizen once again.

Three years of his life has been wasted due to the fact that he had been framed. Deciding to execute him just one day short of three years, then the court would have put Earl Charles to death for a crime in which he did not commit. Secondly, capital punishment is inflicted disproportionately on the poor and minority groups. Fifty years ago, Nobel Prize winner, Gunnar Myrdal, reported that, "the South makes the widest application of the death penalty, and Negro criminals come in much more than their share of executions". Confirmation of these statistics is not just relative to the South, either.

"Between 1930 and 1990, 4,016 persons were executed in the United States. Of these, 2,129 (or 53 percent) were black. During these years African-Americans were about twelve percent of the nation's population" (Bedau 6). According to author D.J. Herda, Racial discrimination was on the grounds of which the Supreme Court relied in Furman vs. Georgia ruling the death penalty unconstitutional. Death row has always been disproportionately black in population in its history in relation to its population percentage.

At the time Furman was convicted of murder, about six-hundred inmate's addresses read Death Row. Of those convicted inmates, several were teenagers, over twenty were women, and a disproportionate many were black. Amidst this discrimination and injustice, no one had ever before confronted this issue on the grounds of injustice towards the poor and oppressed of the nation (Herda 13). Undoubtedly, the choices of human lives are left to the discretion of imperfect human beings.

The history of capital punishment in American society clearly shows the desire to mitigate the harshness of this penalty by narrowing its scope. Discretion, whether authorized by statues or by their silence, has been the main vehicle to this end. But when discretion is used, as it has always been, to mark for death the poor, the friendless, the uneducated, the members of racial minorities, and the despised, then discretion becomes injustice. (Bedau 7). Human nature uses temptation to attract the condemnation of people who are considered unclean. Chances are that a rich white man with a family and children at home is not going to be convicted, while a homeless black man without a dollar or family member to his name is going to carry out that death sentence.

At the same time, capital punishment violates the very principles of the United States Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment. According to the Constitution of the United States of America, The courts ruled under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause rather than under the Eighth Amendment. They concluded that electrocution is an effective way to dole out punishment. "Many years later, a divided Court, assuming the applicability of the Eighth Amendment to the States, held that a second electrocution following a mechanical failure at the first which injured but did not kill the condemned man did not violate the proscription" (U.S. Constitution). Capital punishment denies due process of law.

It ignores individual's attempts to seek justice by depriving new evidence or laws that might result in the juries reversing the conviction or putting the death sentence aside. Consequently, capital punishment violates the very principles of the United States Constitution in the Eighth Amendment. The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America states that, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" (U.S. Constitution). Capital punishment is clearly a violation of the basic rights and freedoms which members of the United States hold so dear. Capital punishment is cruel and unusual, because no human being is more powerful than another to the point where lives are in question.

Conversely, supporters of the death penalty adamantly believe capital punishment to be moral. According the Edward Koch, 'It is by exacting the highest penalty for the taking of human life that we affirm the highest value of human life' (Koch). Human life is a precious gift given to us, which is so delicate that at any moment it can be snatched in the blink of an eye. Because of this, it is a moral obligation that human beings respect life and hold it reverent and true to its value. The value of human life is priceless, and to validate the killing of another defending its value is completely hypocritical. According to Lord Justice Denning, society uses punishment to express its disbelief in certain acts.

Society also uses punishment to maintain respect for the law and government. Most citizens have the attitude that criminals deserve whatever punishment they are given no matter how cruel. "It is a mistake to consider the objects of punishments as being a deterrent, reformative, or preventive and nothing else. The truth is that some crimes are so outrageous that society insists on adequate punishment, because the wrong doer deserves it, irrespective of whether it is a deterrent or not' (Lord Justice Denning). No matter how heinous the crime, how evil the act, human beings do not have the moral right to choose whether another human can live or die. What makes one human more superior than another so that they can choose to kill?

Moreover, capital punishment supporters believe that the practice respects human dignity. According to Professor Walter Berns, 'The criminal law must possess a dignity far beyond that possessed by mere statuary enactment or utilitarian and self-interested calculations; the most powerful means we have to give it that dignity is to authorize it to impose the ultimate penalty' (Prof. Berns). There is absolutely no human dignity involved in and kind of murder, whether some argue it justifiable or not. Every ounce of human dignity is removed once a murder has been committed. Supporters argue that the point of the death penalty is to preserve dignity, but again their ideas become hypocritical.

Nevertheless, capital punishment supporters believe that their system is the natural inclination and moral belief of human beings. However, in the wise words of Immanuel Kant, 'If you kill another, you kill yourself' (Kant). To say that killing of another is a natural human instinct is completely irrational. The human inclination and instinct of what is right and wrong is not always clear and without blemish, but on the topic of death and murder, the conscience is quite clear that the deed is wrong. In conclusion, the death penalty is extremely wrong due to the likelihood of error, the unjust racial allocation, and the violation of constitutional rights. Capital punishment has no place in civilized society because its practices are crude and barbaric.

Any institution allowing the practice of capital punishment is therefore immoral and lacks respect of human dignity. The choice becomes clear. Capital punishment is a form of murder in its cruelest state, and murder is most definitely wrong.