Capital Punishment: The Abolitionist View

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n the murderers of loved ones. Other points death penalty proponents emphasize is that it costs less than imprisonment and that the life imprisonment without possibility of parole option does not incapacitate convicted murderers from committing murders in prison or on escape. Unsurprisingly, the left’s views are on the polar opposite of the conservative perspective and often directly challenge the arguments of death penalty proponents. (University of Alaska)
There are several chief qualms with the death penalty that encapsulate the opinions of those of the left wing. Among these are that capital punishment is “cruel and usual”, “epitomizes the tragic inefficacy and brutality of violence”, “denies due process of law”, “violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection”, “is not a viable form of crime control”, “wastes resources” and “is a violent spectacle of official homicide” (Bedau).
Abolitionists label capital punishment as cruel and unusual. It is cruel because it is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. It is unusual because only the United States of all the western industrialized nations engages in this punishment. When opponents rally against the death penalty, it isn’t an indication of sympathy towards convicted murderers. Like the majority of the public, they too equate murder with a lack of respect for human life. Just as murder is abhorrent, state-authorized killings are immoral. In fact, leftists argue that it embodies the appalling inefficiency and brutality of violence rather than a civilized solution to difficult social problems. (Bedau) “[T]he eighth amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment mandates that the state, even when it undertakes to punish an individual who has transgressed laws, recog...