The Not so Clean Cut Issue of Capital Punishment, Essay on the issues involved with capital punishment

Essay by TheLizardKingCollege, UndergraduateA+, October 2004

download word file, 3 pages 2.0

The not so Clean-Cut Issue of Capital Punishment

Former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, writes about a New York man who while serving four life sentences in a New York prison for murder, effectively lured a woman corrections officer into an office where he then strangled her and mutilated her body. This man can only get more life sentences for his actions because New York, at the time, did not have a death penalty, "[he] has effectively been given a license to kill" (649). The death penalty is always a highly argued issue. There are many aspects of the issue one must consider in order to make an educated decision on which argument to support. Among the arguments one must consider are several key questions: does the death penalty deter heinous crimes from being committed? Is the death penalty morally wrong? Could an innocent man be executed for a crime he did not commit? Capital Punishment must be applied in moderation and only in highly deserving cases because of the moral issues involved as well as its lack of reversibility.

According to Mike Farrell author and president of Death Penalty Focus "the death penalty is not a deterrent." (1) The Thorsten Sellin studies in 1962, 1967, and 1980 proved that the death penalty is not a deterrent (1). If the death penalty is not a deterrent to the commission of violent crimes than it should no longer be used in that manner. By using the death penalty regularly it is an attempt to showcase to the country that if you

Duff 2

commit a certain crime deemed deserving of the death penalty than you will receive death. The death penalty is, according to the DPF, not doing that at all, this means that we should back off...