Term paper on Capital Punishment And Ethics

Capital Punishment And Ethics Essays

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The use of capital punishment has been a permanent fixture in society since the

earliest civilizations and continues to be used as a form of punishment in

countries today. It has been used for various crimes ranging from the desertion

of soldiers during wartime to the more heinous crimes of serial killers.

However, the mere fact that this brutal form of punishment and revenge has been

the policy of many nations in the past does not subsequently warrant its

implementation in today's society. The death penalty is morally and socially

unethical, should be construed as cruel and unusual punishment since it is both

discriminatory and arbitrary, has no proof of acting as a deterrent, and risks

the atrocious and unacceptable injustice of executing innocent people. As long

as capital punishment exists in our society it will continue to spark the

injustice which it has failed to curb. Capital punishment is immoral and

unethical. It does not matter who does the killing because when a life is taken

by another it is always wrong. By killing a human being the state lessens the

value of life and actually contributes to the growing sentiment in today's

society that certain individuals are worth more than others. When the value of

life is lessened under certain circumstances such as the life of a murderer,

what is stopping others from creating their own circumstances for the value of

one's life such as race, class, religion, and economics. Immanual Kant, a great

philosopher of ethics, came up with the Categorical Imperative, which is a

universal command or rule that states that society and individuals "must

act in such a way that you can will that your actions become a universal law for

all to follow" (Palmer 265). There must be some set of moral and ethical

standards that even the government can not supersede, otherwise how can the

state expect its citizens not to follow its own example. Those who support the

death penalty believe, or claim to believe, that capital punishment is morally

and ethically acceptable. The bulk of their evidence comes from the Old

Testament which actually recommends the use of capital punishment for a number

of crimes. Others also quote the Sixth Commandment which, in the original Hebrew

reads, "Thou Shall Not Commit Murder." However, these literal

interpretations of selected passages from the Bible which are often quoted out

of context corrupt the compassionate attitude of Judaism and Christianity, which

clearly focuses on redemption and forgiveness, and urges humane and effective

ways of dealing with crime and violence. Those who use the Bible to support the

death penalty are by themselves since almost all religious groups in the United

States regard executions as immoral. They include, American Baptist Churches

USA, American Jewish Congress, California Catholic Council, Christian reformed

Church, Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church in America, Mennonite General

Conference, National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, Northern

Ecumenical Council, Presbyterian Church (USA), Reformed Church of America,

Southern California Ecumenical Council, Unitarian/Universalist Association,

United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church (Death Penalty Focus).

Those that argue that the death penalty is ethical state that former great

leaders and thinkers such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin

Franklin, Kant, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Mill all supported it

(Koch 324). However, Washington and Jefferson, two former presidents and admired

men, both supported slavery as well. Surely, the advice of someone who clearly

demonstrated a total disregard for the value of human life cannot be considered

in such an argument as capital punishment. In regard to the philosophers,

Immanuel Kant, a great ethical philosopher stated that the motives behind

actions determine whether something is moral or immoral (Palmer 271). The

motives behind the death penalty, which revolve around revenge and the

"frustration and rage of people who see that the government is not coping

with violent crime," are not of good will, thereby making capital

punishment immoral according to ethical philosophy (Bruck 329). The question of

whether executions are a "cruel" form of punishment may no longer be

an argument against capital punishment now that it can be done with lethal

injections, but it is still very "unusual" in that it only applies to

a select number of individuals making the death penalty completely

discriminatory and arbitrary. After years of watching the ineffectiveness of

determining who should be put to death, the Supreme Court in the1972 Furman v.

Georgia decision "invalidated all existing death sentence statues as

violative of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment and thus

depopulated state death rows of 629 occupants" (Berger 352). This decision

was reached not because it was believed that the death penalty was intrinsically

cruel and unusual but because, as Justice Stewart put it, the "death

penalty as actually applied was unconstitutionally arbitrary" (Berger 353).

Local politics, money, race, and where the crime is committed can often play a

more decisive role in sentencing someone to death than the actual facts of the

crime. According to Amnesty International, the "death penalty is a lethal

lottery: just one out of every one hundred people arrested for murder is

actually executed" (Death Penalty Focus). In regards to racial

discrimination in sentencing, it has been found that "racial bias focuses

primarily on the race of the victim, not the defendant" (Berger 355). Only

31 out of the more than 15, 000 recorded executions in this country have been of

white defendants convicted of killing black victims, while black defendants

convicted of raping white women were commonly sentenced to death (Death Penalty

Focus). Stephen Nathanson, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University

addresses the problems of discrimination and randomness best by saying, "as

long as racial, class, religious, and economic bias continue to be important

determinants of who is executed, the death penalty will continue to create and

perpetuate injustice" (Nathanson 346). Proponents of capital punishment

believe that the argument that the death penalty is discriminatory and arbitrary

does not give support to the abolition of capital punishment, but rather to the

extension of it. Edward Koch, the former mayor of New York from 1978 to 1989 and

death penalty supporter, states that the discriminatory manner of the death

penalty "no longer seems to be the problem it once was," yet in 1987,

the Supreme Court case of McCleskey v. Kemp established that in Georgia someone

who kills a white person is four times more likely to be sentenced to death than

someone who kills a black person (Death Penalty Focus). In response...

Berger, Vivian, "Rolling the Dice to Decide Who Dies," New York
State Bar Journal, October 1988. Bruck, David, "The Death Penalty,"
The New Republic, May 20, 1985. Death Penalty Focus (DPF), "Myths and Facts
about California's Death Penalty," pamphlet Koch, Edward, "Death and
Justice: How Capital Punishment Affirms Life," The New Republic, April 15,
1985. Nathanson, Stephen, "What If the Death Penalty Did Save Lives?"
An Eye for an Eye? The Morality of Punishing by Death, 1987. Palmer, Donald,
Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy, Mayfield Publishing
Company, London, 1996. Van den Haag, Ernest, The Death Penalty Pro and Con: A
Debate, 1983. You should cite this paper as follows:

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