Capital Punishment Essay Research Paper How do

Capital Punishment`s Cost Essay, Research Paper

How do you feel about the saying, .an eye for an eye.. Do you feel that it

is a good saying to run a nation by. Or do you agree with Gandhi who added to

that statement, .–and everyone is blind.. There have been many

controversies in the history of the United States, ranging from abortion to gun

control; however, capital punishment has been one of the most hotly contested

issues in recent decades. Capital Punishment is the execution of a criminal

pursuant to a sentence of death imposed by a competent court. It is not intended

to inflict any physical pain or any torture; it is only another form of

punishment. This form of punishment is irrevocable because it removes those

punished from society permanently, instead of temporarily imprisoning them, this

is the best and most effective way to deal with criminals. The usual alternative

to the death penalty is life-long imprisonment. Capital punishment is a method

of retributive punishment as old as civilization itself. The death penalty has

been imposed throughout history for many crimes, ranging from blasphemy and

treason to petty theft and murder. Many ancient societies accepted the idea that

certain crimes deserved capital punishment. Ancient Roman and Mosaic Law

endorsed the notion of retaliation; they believed in the rule of .an eye for

an eye.. Similarly, the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks all executed

citizens for a variety of crimes. The most famous people who were executed were

Socrates (Saunders 462) and Jesus. Only in England, during the reigns of King

Canute (1016-1035; Hoyt 151) and William the Conqueror (1066-1087; Miller 259)

was the death penalty not used, although the results of interrogation and

torture were often fatal. Later, Britain reinstated the death penalty and

brought it to its American colonies. Although the death penalty was widely

accepted throughout the early United States, not everyone approved of it. In the

late-eighteenth century, opposition to the death penalty gathered enough

strength to lead to important restrictions on the use of the death penalty in

several northern states, while in the United States, Michigan, Wisconsin, and

Rhode Island abandoned the practice altogether. In 1794, Pennsylvania adopted a

law to distinguish the degrees of murder and only use the death penalty for

premeditated first-degree murder. Another reform took place in 1846 in

Louisiana. This state abolished the mandatory death penalty and authorized the

option of sentencing a capital offender to life imprisonment rather than to

death. After the 1830s, public executions ceased to be demonstrated but did not

completely stop until after 1936. Throughout history, governments have been

extremely inventive in devising ways to execute people. Executions inflicted in

the past are now regarded today as ghastly, barbaric, and unthinkable and are

forbidden by law almost everywhere. Common historical methods of execution

included: stoning, crucifixion, burning, breaking on the wheel, drawing and

quartering, beheading and decapitation, shooting, and hanging. These types of

punishments today are banned by the eighth amendment to the constitution (The

Constitution, Amendment 8). In the United States, the death penalty is currently

implemented in one of five ways: firing squad, hanging, gas chamber,

electrocution, and lethal injection. These methods of execution compared to

those of the past are not meant for torture, but meant for punishment for the

crime. For the past decades, capital punishment has been one of the most hotly

contested political issues in America. This debate is a complicated one. Capital

punishment is a legal, practical, philosophical, social, political, and moral

question. The notion of deterrence has been at the very center of the practical

debate over the question of capital punishment. Most of us assume that we

execute murderers primarily because we believe it will discourage others from

becoming murderers. Retentionists have long asserted the deterrent power of

capital punishment as an obvious fact. The fear of death deters people from

committing crimes. Still, abolitionists believe that deterrence is little more

than an assumption and a naive assumption at that. Abolitionists claim that

capital punishment does not deter murderers from killing or killing again. They

base most of their argument against deterrence on statistics. States that use

capital punishment extensively show a higher murder rate than those that have

abolished the death penalty. Also, states that have abolished the death penalty

and then reinstated it show no significant change in murder rate. They say

adjacent states with the death penalty and those without show no long-term

differences in the number of murders that occur in that state. And finally,

there has been no record of change in t

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