I personally believe that the death penalty is a good practice that some states follow and believe that all states should pursue. In my opinion if you do a crime that takes away an innocent life you should have to pay the ultimate price. Research has shown that the death penalty is a major deterrent of crime. It has also shown that for every person that they execute they save around 18 lives. For each and every person that we have in our prisons each day it cost us and the United States roughly 60 dollars a day to keep them in captivity. If we take there life away we would be saving ourselves tons of money that can be spent towards more important issues that we face as a country.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Capital Punishment
Capital punishment was first instituted in the late 1700's by the first settlers of the United States. For crimes ranging from petty theft to murder. In the United States there are currently 38 out of the 50 United States that have and use the death penalty to punish criminals. The methods that they use to execute the criminals are lethal injection, electric chair, gas chamber, hanging, and firing squad. The criminal may chose the way that they want to be executed using one of the methods listed above.
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On what basis is killing then ethical, are you making a consequentialist arguement that the death penalty saves lives and money. Is it ethical to make the arguement that we can equate a cost for human life.
ReplyDeleteI would challenge you to demonstrate that the death penalty is a penalty that is distributed failry across all of th population, or are people who are oor an uneducated more likely to recieve that penalty, if this is the case is this ethical.
Also how many mistakes or to put it another way, how many wrong executions would you allow to occur and still see the penalty as ethical.
Your arguement plays on emotion, now take it bakc to logical rationale arguement that applies ethical theory.
Playing the devil's advocate, I think consideration should be given to the money spent on the appeals process. Every death row inmate gets so many opportunities to have his execution stayed. We might be saving $60/day by killing them, but that is only after having spent thousands, if not hundreds of thousands in the process of getting them to the point of execution. If the inmate cannot afford this appeals process, then in all likelihood, they will be executed. So this is unreasonable and unjust as it in not an equal process for all.
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