Capitol Punishment

5 Pages 1273 Words

The Ultimate Punishment

Your choices would be either to die gasping and coughing to try to force toxic chemicals out of your lungs, or to be injected with a lethal mixture of chemicals until your body submits to the poison circulating in through your veins. That would be a rather tough decision to make. It is the decision made by a few inmates on death-row. These methods of murder are an example of inhumanities and injustices in today’s system of capital punishment. The commonly offered arguments for the death penalty are filled with holes. The death penalty has yet to be proven as an effective deterrent. And it is actually a continuation of the cycle of violence which “...degrades all who are involved in its enforcement, as well as its victim.”(Stewart 1) Realistically, the death penalty is an expensive and time consuming process. The death penalty is ineffective when it comes to serving justice to our society today.
The most frequent argument for capital punishment is probably that of deterrence. The idea behind this is that criminals will choose not to do certain crimes for fear that a death penalty could be their punishment. Numerous studies have been created attempting to prove this belief; however, “all the evidence taken together makes it hard to be confident that capital punishment deters more than long prison terms do.”(Cavanagh 4) Going ever farther, the executive director of the Montgomery based Equal Justice Initiative, has stated that “people are increasingly realizing that the more we resort to killing as a legitimate response to our frustration and anger with violence, the more violent our society becomes…We could execute all three thousand people on death row, and most people would not feel any safer tomorrow.”(Frame 51) In addition, with the growing humanitarianism of modern society, the number of inmates actually put to death is lower than 50 years ago. This creates a situation in which the d...