Jeffrey Toobin's Perspectives On Capital Punishment

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Perspectives on Capital Punishment
What is capital punishment? Capital punishment is defined as “The legal authorization to kill someone as a punishment for a crime.” The death penalty has been a widely debated topic on its moral standing and effectiveness of use. In this paper I will be presenting the thoughts of four people; Austin Sarat, Kent Scheidegger, Jeffrey Toobin, and my own and our perspectives on capital punishment being used.
Austin Sarat, professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, wrote the article ‘Bearing Witness and Writing History in the Struggle Against Capital Punishment’ to showcase his thoughts against capital punishment (Sarat, 1996). Sarat’s view on the system is one of struggle for …show more content…

Toobin sees capital punishment as inhuman and an unusual form of punishment. Throughout the years there has always been a method of choice with dealing criminals such as hangings, dismemberment, electrocution, and the list goes on as Toobin explains (Toobin, 2013). He believes that the strive for justification of the capital punishment system is not for a better system, no he believes that the strive is to make the death penalty seem humane in our society (Toobin, 2013). Toobin views it as the American faith trying to justify an action that is immoral at its core. He believes that there is no technological advancement or new way of execution, that can make the process of capital punishment acceptable. Lastly I will add my own perspective on capital …show more content…

As Toobin’s said, capital punishment was an everlasting train of procedures that tried to find the best way to execute someone as humanly as possible. The use of capital punishment should only have been used for the crimes of homicide, murder. If they intend to kill and carried out their plan, then no matter who they are they receive punishment for the murder. Sadly, that leaves some people in a situation where they will also need to end a life as an executor. A religious man may have hoped for them to receive retribution in the afterlife but in a society as ours the people should cast judgment on our fellow criminals. However, use of capital punishment as a way to punish them is problematic unless capital punishment receives some extreme changes. What should these changes be? Until we can satisfy the need of a cost, functional, effective, and moral way of ending another’s life there is no satisfying change to allow use of capital punishment.
Capital punishment has been a hot topic debate the past years, especially now that it is slowly dying out throughout the states. In this paper I have brought out four people’s opinion on their views about capital punishment. With these people ideals, I wanted to bring forth a small sample of people’s ideals to leave the you, the reader, with some perspective on others

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