Capital Punishment is Ineffective

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When remarking on the issue of capital punishment, Henry Ford was quoted as saying that “[c]apital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty”(“Henry Ford”). His comment, while not saying that capital punishment and charity does not have the right idea about how to deal with the issues that plague societies, it does say that it does not properly address the issue so that it can be completely solved. While portrayed as the solution for to stop those thinking about committing serious offenses, this does not seemed to be the case at all. Capital punishment does not deter nor solve the issues that it is meant to deal with and instead creates more. In this paper, it will go over a brief history of capital punishment, the current state of capital punishment in the United States and what the outlook for it is.
According to Michael Kronenwetter, punishment of any kind stems from the fact that “[...] [t]here must be a penalty for wrongdoing”. Prior to governments taking over the administrative role, people “[...] were expected to take their own revenge on those who had wronged them. If a man robbed or killed another person, or raped a woman, it was up to the victim or the victim's family to exact a price from the wrongdoer”. This created major problems in the fact that it left those who were weak in power at the mercy of the strong. False accusations could go unchecked and unjust punishment would be given to those who could not properly defend themselves. Death was used a penalty for crimes that were “applied […] sparingly and only for the most terrible of crimes. Others imposed it for minor offenses” such as under the Roman Law of the Twelve Tablets death was the penalty for publis...

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...if.: ABC-CLIO. (Original work published 1993)
Laurence, J. (1960). A history of capital punishment. New York: Citadel Press.
Mcguire, E. (2010, May 15). Capital punishment: The ugly truth.The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/280643763?accountid=28518
Murder. (2012, August 20). FBI. Retrieved November 10, 2013, from http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/violent-crime/murder
Reggio, M. H. (2012). History of the Death Penalty. Frontline, 0. Retrieved November 10, 2013, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/execution/readings/history.html
Waltenburg, E. N. (2008). The future of america's death penalty: An agenda for the next generation of capital punishment research.Justice System Journal,29(3), 447-X. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/194778726?accountid=28518

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