Capital Punishment Essay - It’s Time to Turn the Other Cheek :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Capital Punishment Its Time to Turn the Other Cheek         If... he has committed murder, he must die. In this case, there is nosubstitute that lead satisfy the legal requirements of legal justice.There is nosameness of kind between death and remaining alive even under the near miserableconditions, and consequently there is no equality between crime and theretribution unless the criminal is judicially condemned and put to death.Immanuel Kant.         About 2000  men, women, and teenagers currently wait on Americas DeathRow. Their time grows shorter as federal and state courts increasingly ratifydeath penalty laws, allowing executions to proceed at an accelerated rate. Itsunlikely that any of these executions entrust make the front page, having becomemore and more a matter of routine in the last decade. Indeed, recent publicopinion polls evidence a wide margin of support for the death penalty. But humanrights a dvocates continue to decry the im lessonity of state-sanctioned killing inthe U.S., the only western modify country that continues to use thedeath penalty. Is capital penalisation moral?         Capital punishment is often defended on the grounds by the government,that society has a moral obligation to protect the safety and the welfare of itscitizens. Murderers threaten this safety and welfare. Only by putting murderersto death can society ensure that convicted killers do non kill again.         Second, those favoring capital punishment contend that society shouldsupport those practices that will bring about the greatest balance of good overevil, and capital punishment is one such practice. Capital punishment benefitssociety because it may monish violent crime.  While it is difficult to producedirect evidence to support this vociferation since, by definition, those who aredeterred by the death penalty do not co mmit murders, common sense tells us thatthey will die if they perform a certain act, they will be unwilling to performthat act. If the threat of death stays in the hand of a would-be murder, and weabolish the death penalty, we will sacrifice the lives of many innocent victimswhose murders could have been deterred. But if, in fact, the death penalty doesnot deter, and we continue to impose it, we have only sacrificed the lives ofconvicted murderers. Surely it is go for society to take a gamble that thedeath penalty deters in order to protect the lives of innocent people than totake a gamble that it doesnt deter and thereby protect the lives of murderers,while risking the lives of the innocents.         Finally, defenders of capital punishment argue that justice demands that