Captial Punishment: Just or Unjust?

Punishment takes various forms, but the decisive end of life arouses the emotions of all, not just those directly affected, to dispute the ethics of capital punishment. At the core of the controversy, two educated assessments are made; abolitionists attempt to prove that the death penalty is unnecessary and unjust, while its advocates proclaim the opposite. Avid abolitionist Jack Greenberg writes in his article “Against the American System of Capital Punishment,” that not only does the current system fail to deter but it is enforced unfairly because of the bias infesting our courts. Ernest van den Haag counters this belief with his article, “The Ultimate Punishment: a Defense,” which shifts the focus away from deterrence, stating that it is not a beneficial argument for either side. Haag also argues that “justice is independent of distributional inequalities” (Haag, par. 7)

We will not be able to truly determine with studies whether or not death is an effective deterrent because we can not enter the mind of a likely murderer, but we can recognize justice, and we should not be appalled at a few exceptions of equality when the termination of the death penalty will create a deprivation of justice.

Partisans often use an idealized system of justice when they defend capital punishment, Greenburg writes, but in reality the death penalty can not deter any more than life imprisonment (Greenburg, par. 15). Thorsten Sellin conducted studies, used by Greenburg, reveling that even when the death penalty was widely administered it was still a poor deterrent (Greenburg, par. 16). Greenburg doubts that a killer actually considers the possibility of being caught, and in the unlikely event that capture is considered a criminal will s...

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... administer equal judgments, but if it fails in a few instances, should we handicap its ability to do so in the future?

Failure to preserve the final penalty of death in the United States of America would be a blunder because of the probability that its finality has deterred and will deter murder, thus saving innocent lives. Killers forfeited their right to continue living when they took the most basic right of life from another. We should reform our courts, placing more responsibility on judges to pursue more evenhanded verdicts. Whether you support the death penalty or not, if some are unsatisfied with the escape of a criminal from death, then there is still work to be done in providing adequate and fair punishment. It is impossible to achieve absolute perfection in our justice system, but when it is the goal improvement is unavoidable.