John Stuart Mill's View On Capital Punishment

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Capital punishment is still recognized in many countries, including the United States, as a form of punishment for horrendous crimes, such as aggravated murder. There are always large debates about whether or not that capital punishment is an easy way out of serving a life sentence. My thesis is that I agree with Mill in believing capital punishment is kinder to prisoners than serving a life sentence.
John Stuart Mill believes that capital punishment, or in laymen’s terms the death penalty, is kinder to a prisoner than having the prisoner serving life in prison. In Mill’s speech on capital punishment that he delivered in April of 1868 he stated “Few, I think, would venture to propose, as a punishment for aggravated murder, less than imprisonment …show more content…

(Mill, page 69) Mill believes this is the only argument against capital punishment because he does see the problems with convicting the wrong person and then sentencing them to death. Once the death is over there is no change mind button. The human, whether innocent or guilty, is gone forever and cannot be resurrected from the dead. In the passage where Mill is talking about how capital punishment is irreversible, he is saying that capital punishment may not always be kinder than life in prison especially when the person who is killed is later to be found innocent then in that sense the government took away a life that could have been …show more content…

Mill brings up any arguments of how just killing a man is easier to do than serving a life sentence because many people are more willing to have a prisoner killed than serve life in prison because they also want them to suffer. John Stuart Mill also talks about how many countries are more likely to make mistakes when capital punishment is on the table rather than a life sentence. I agree with Mill because when a person is sentenced to death they do not have the time to think about their actions and they can then be released from their suffering on earth. I also agree with Mill that people are going to make more mistakes when they are killing a man because they really want the person to be guilty even if they are

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