The Death Penalty, a Matter of Morals Essay

Proponents of the death penalty, which includes the majority of Americans, believe it to be neither cruel nor unusual, on the contrary, they think it just and fair. The ‘eye for an eye’ group not only accepts but vocally insists that the death penalty be continued. I believe the use of the death penalty to be the most obvious and heinous example of cruel and unusual punishment. A government should not be vested with the power to put any of its citizens to death. In addition, the practice is racially biased, overtly costly and does not achieve the intended outcome.

Death penalty proponents make reasonable arguments to support their position, one being that the punishment that is not unjust. The deliberate act taking of an innocent life is unjust. Further, a society should not condone allowing murderers to keep their lives after imposing the death sentence themselves on another and by that act, also sentencing the victim’s family to a life-sentence of anguish. If someone steals a car, for example, and was allowed to keep and drive it around town without fear of retribution, no one would think that fair. It is it neither fair to allow anyone that steals a life to keep their own. By allowing people who have been convicted of acting as a self-appointed executioner to keep their own life devalues human life on the whole. Protestant and Catholic philosophy have consistently confirmed the right of a fair government to end the life of convicted murderers.

Those that use the Old Testament to justify the use of the death penalty as moral either overlooked or ignored the passage in the New Testament where Jesus rebuffs this statement explicitly then reminds his followers to instead ‘turn the other cheek.’ Christians who live in Europe tend to oppose capital punishment but those in America, tend to support it. Capital punishment does not deter crime which statistics have proven, a fact not disputed by proponents. The death penalty serves only to quench society’s thirst for revenge.

Acting upon the emotion of revenge is wrong and ultimately more destructive to the value system and very fabric of society than the crime itself. Capital punishment is ethically and morally objectionable in today’s society. Every life should be valued and imprisoning a person for life without the possibility for parole is adequate punishment. Although the U.S. court system is at least among the most equitable in the world, no system of justice can expect to provide perfect results 100 percent of the time. Mistakes are inherent within all systems that rely on the human element for proof and judgment. Rather than a hundred guilty be set free then one innocent person is punished. That is the standard a civilized society should set.

If offenses that caused ‘no harm to others’ were decriminalized, such as gambling, prostitution, and drug possession, the inmate population would decrease by about half. This would allow for the violent offenders to serve their entire sentence without having to be paroled early because of overcrowding. Thus, society would be properly protected.

The societies in European countries have already formed the opinion that the death penalty is both ‘cruel’ and ‘unusual’ punishment that remains largely ineffectual. Most European citizens enjoy cradle to grave health care and are much less likely to be incarcerated than those in the U.S. Though there is much evidence to the contrary, American society is growing more compassionate through time. The 1964 Civil Rights Act is but one example of this. One day, it will be a compassionate society that does not use the emotion of revenge to decide its laws and the death penalty will go the way of the Salem witch trials, a barbaric punishment of the distant past.