As time has gone on, civilizations have advanced. We've grown from nomadic hunter-gatherers, to agricultural civilizations, to industrialized societies. Many nations have grown in terms of political structure, from dictatorships and monarchies, to democracies. We've grown in our health and medicine practices, from using medicine men and spells, to letting blood out, to now using incredible methods that have increased the average life span to 75 years. However, across all of these breakthroughs in society, through all of the advancements we’ve made, we’ve kept the oldest and most outdated form of punishment-the death penalty. This reactionary mean of punishing is barbaric and illogical, but our great nation has ignored the international trend and has continued to practice capital punishment. How can we look down upon foreign countries for their crude governments and justice systems, when here on our own soil we kill our own people? Since World War II, when human rights became a vital international issue, the number of countries that use the death penalty has gone down more than the economy of the last two years. 48 of 50 European nations have completely abolished the death penalty. Over two-thirds of the world no longer kills their own, yet our stubbornness has led us to resist this change. These nations have noted the hypocrisy in killing people as punishment for killing people. They have discovered what Mahatma Gandhi discovered, that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” They have realized that it is not up to the government to determine who gets to live and who does not. America, on the other hand, has turned a blind eye, if you will, towards this new movement.
During one of the debates leading up to the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush stated that “[deterring crime] is the only reason to be for [the death penalty].” Many people agree with President Bush here in that capital punishment prevents crimes from happening and thus saves lives. However, this is hardly accepted as fact. A September 2000 New York Times article reported that 10 of the 12 states without the death penalty had homicide rates lower than the national average. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Texas has killed four times more people than any other state, yet their homicide rate is above the national average. Northwestern University’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology recently released a survey showing that less than 10% of criminologists believe that the death penalty serves as a deterrent. The explanation behind this is fairly obvious to me. In order to support the idea that capital punishment prevents crime, one must agree that a potential criminal would decide against committing murder out of fear of being killed by the state. If the stats aren’t enough for you, just think about this situation logically. Most homicides are done out of rage, in a fit of emotion. When emotion takes over and a potential criminal has a gun in their hand, they’re not thinking about whether or not they might get a death sentence for this or might just go to jail for the rest of their life without the possibility of parole. That’s why these statistics show that the death penalty doesn’t prevent crime. Logically, it shouldn’t. If capital punishment doesn’t prevent future crime, then even President Bush says there’s no reason for it. Quite a turn of the tables, isn’t it?
Now, looking at this situation morally, is it okay to kill someone to set an example to prevent other crimes? And the even larger question is, does the government have the right to determine who lives and who doesn’t? As leading death penalty abolitionist Helen Prejean has said, “the profound moral question is not, ‘Do they deserve to die?’ but ‘Do we deserve to kill them?’”
Murder is illegal in every society in the world and in every state in our nation. It’s punishable by decades of time in prison, or sometimes…murder. Murder can be punished by murder. The hypocrisy behind this is obvious and quite scary really. The ‘eye for an eye’ philosophy of Hammurabi’s code has long passed and realized to be outdated and unjust. But still we sit today, in what is supposedly the most advanced nation in the world, following the same practice. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language-College Edition defines murder as “the unlawful and malicious or premeditated killing of one human being by another.” The unlawful portion of this definition is arbitrary as many societies have different laws. By European standards, capital punishment is unlawful, while it is currently legal here in the States. This makes it impossible to determine what truly is legal and what isn’t on a justice level. As for the malicious part, I can’t think of any intentional killing that isn’t malicious and filled with a desire to harm others. Any death that results because of deliberate action can be considered malicious. I’ll let the French Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Albert Camus explain how premeditated the death penalty is. He writes, “Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.” Looking at the definition of murder closely, it’s hard to make a case that capital punishment isn’t murder. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst wrote “What is murder in the first degree? It is cruel, calculated, cold-blooded killing of a fellow human man. It is the most wicked of crimes and the State is guilty of it every time it executes a human being.” How can the government get away with murder every time it kills one of its own citizens? The answer is it shouldn’t. It is not up to the state to decide who has the right of life and who doesn’t. Murdering criminals won’t bring their victims back to life, it won’t prevent future crime, and it won’t undo the crime they’ve done. It simply breaks the law.
China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Korea were the top 4 countries in terms of executions carried out in 2008. The United States of America has the distinct honor of being fifth on that list, followed by Pakistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. That’s not that kind of company we’d like to be among. I’d rather have my nation be associated with England, France, Australia, Norway, and other advanced, respected nations that don’t execute their citizens. As a nation, we’ve grown quite a bit since we first wrote our Constitution in 1787. We’ve dropped the barbaric practice of slavery. We’ve given the franchise to blacks and women. There’s just one more stop we need to take on the justice train. If we dropped our barbaric policy of killing our own people and followed the trend set by our peers, we’d gain much more respect with foreign countries around the globe. Not only would this help with our foreign relations, but it’d be doing the just thing, the right thing.
The cons of capital punishment outweigh the pros by a large margin. Morally, we can’t feel good about killing in order to ‘set an example,’ or killing for any reason. The government is set up to discourage crimes, not to hypocritically murder those who murder others. The main pro is that the death penalty prevents crime, but we’ve proven this to be false. It really has no affect on future crime. In order to grow, we need to advance as a nation. Capital punishment is outdated, crude, and unnecessary. It doesn’t have a place in our justice system anymore.
Bibliography
1. Haney, Craig. Death by Design: Capital Punishment as a Social Psychological System. 1. Oxford University Press, 2005. 352. Print.
2. "On the Issues." 25 Nov 2009. Web. 13 Dec 2009. <http://www.ontheissues.org/
3. "Cynthia McKinney's Huntsville Speech." YoutTube Video. Web. 13 Dec 2009.
4. Fourteen Days in May. BBC.
5. Donohue, John. "The Death Penalty:No Evidence for Deterrence." Economist, Web. 13 Dec 2009. <http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.
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