Critical Analysis of Edward Koch's Essay, "Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment Affirms Life"

In Edward I. Koch's essay, "Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment Affirms Life", readers view the opinions Koch has toward the death penalty in today's world. Koch reviews a variety of excuses to abolish the death penalty. He argues the importance of the death penalty, as well as, argues excuses of the death penalty opponents. He argues the ethics and politics towards the importance and support of the death penalty. In the following essay readers will see an evaluation of Koch's essay. The evaluation will: contain a brief overview of Koch's essay, state whether or not Koch's arguments were strong and persuasive, and state whether the essay was successful in what it was trying to say.

The essay, "Death and Justice", contains several of Koch's arguments toward the death penalty. He begins his arguments by analyzing the statement, "The death penalty is 'barbaric'" (Koch, 715). That alone comes off very strong to readers and he continues to use strong words, such as horrify. He then goes on to compare the death penalty to finding a cure for cancer in order to convince readers that the death penalty is needed in order to tolerate injustice, it was very persuasive and passionate. Moving on to his second argument, Koch goes into talking about how the United States is one of few other countries that even has a death penalty. He goes into using statistics in this argument in order to try to prove his point to readers. This argument was not as strong and passionate as the last one and it wasn't very convincing because all it contained were studies and numbers, which can make the reader become less interested in what the author is trying to say. In Koch's third argument he starts off by saying that, "An innocent person might...