Death Penalty

The death penalty is a punishment prescribed by the state legislature or Congress in order to use it on those people who have committed murders or capital crimes. The Supreme Court has not made it mandatory to pose capital punishment over every person, while the jury has a right to decide it (Legal Information Institute, n.d.). Still, there is a major division in the country regarding whether it is possible to accept the death penalty, and whether it really has a positive effect on murder rate. As it is obvious, the public cannot make a final choice about what position they have to take, as many people consider death penalty as an advantageous practice to the society, while others regard it as something immoral and inhumane. Thereafter, the objective of the following paper is to review the issue whether it is a rational and an effective way to respond to the crimes of certain prisoners. The paper also shall review the positive and negative impact of death penalty on the society overall and discuss some recent examples.

 

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First, it is important to discuss what crimes and what prisoners should be punished with death penalty. Multiple politicians and governmental workers enter debates in order to point out what is good and what is bad once the state authorizes the death penalty. Some believe that capital punishment is the real punishment to those, who deserve it, while it is not applicable to standard murders, and only horrible and horrendous cases fall under that category. In other words, capital punishment is not a thing that every villain deserves. On the other hand, the awful example can be one case where a huge guy has literary butchered his girlfriend, and has cut down the head of her baby. Such cases deserve the most severe punishment. In order to make a decision whether the case deserves the death penalty as the punishment, there exists a state statute that helps prosecutors to base their suggestions of clear data and legal evidence. The number of murders has definitely decreased, as it is the major observation of many prosecutors, which is why capital punishment is applicable only to seldom cases. In addition to that, there have been no cases (within Missouri), where the people who have been executed were proven innocent after, which means that only those who deserve it get capital punishment. It is also not relevant to speak about any kind of prejudice and bias towards people of other nations and another skill color, as there has been no radical disparity, and the majority of the convicted felons are white males.

On the other hand, the justice is blind to someone whose close people were killed, but it does not mean that the death penalty is the best option. The example to that can be the Missouri state, where prosecutors have the right to put the death penalty on the table if the case is one of the worth, but there is no clear definition what that ‘worth’ actually is. Prosecutors usually follow the state guideline, and it is not right, as people do not always know how to apply justice, while the state guideline has only a list of adjectives used by the mentioned prosecutors without having a profound understanding whether the person really deserves to be murdered by the state. It is not right to take someone’s life only to have revenge because America has already committed many sins in the past such as slavery and ban of women’s right to vote. It is quite possible that those individuals who vote for death penalty have never faced something like that (neither their relative did), which is why their judgement is not always fair. Moreover, the USA is one of those countries in the Middle East who have the capital punishment, which is a very bad example (Phillips, 2014).

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Secondly, it is important to review the data in order to state if the enforcement of capital punishment has actually cut the number of murders in the past. Logically speaking, any kind of the research conducted in relation to death penalty should have certain implications over the policy-making processes. Thereafter, in 1970’s John Lamperti conducted the research where he proved that death penalty had nothing to do with murder rates. It is necessary to state that it is practically impossible to measure the correlation between the capital punishment and the number of murder cases as it depends on social environment, time, and location, which varies from state to state (Lamperti, n.d.). Nevertheless, the evidence on death penalty is the important information for many states to favor or not to favor the capital punishment, and the study conducted in 2003 by the researchers proved that death penalty entailed a strong deterrent effect. Moreover, every execution has around eighteen fewer murders, and the empirical studies have supported this data with the margin error plus or minus ten (Dezhbakhsh, et.al., 2003).

It is also important to mention that in 2014 the cases that took place in some states were considered unconstitutional due to the unethical manner of ‘killing’ the convicted murderers. Many men have reported inhumane pain while they took the cocktails of death, and some of them suffered for two hours until they passed away. The federal judge of Californian has mentioned that such approach was unconstitutional and this announcement made people all around the country think over the notion of capital punishment again. It is relevant to state that the death penalty might find its place on the same line of debates regarding the same-sex marriages and abortions – the one that people would never close or agree with the common point of view (Caplan-Bricker, 2014). Such organization as Amnesty International has always been against the capital punishment, stating that it is inhuman and even cruel.