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- Legality. The United States is one of 55 countries globally with a legal death penalty, according to Amnesty International. As of Mar. 24, 2021, within the US, 27 states had a legal death penalty (though 3 of those states had a moratorium on the punishment’s use).
- Life without Parole. Life without Parole (also called LWOP) is suggested by some as an alternative punishment for the death penalty. PRO. Proponents of replacing the death penalty with life without parole argue that imprisoning someone for the duration of their life is more humane than the death penalty, that LWOP is a more fitting penalty that allows the criminal to think about what they’ve done, and that LWOP reduces the chances of executing an innocent person.
- Deterrence. One of the main justifications for maintaining a death penalty is that the punishment may prevent people from committing crimes so as to not risk being sentenced to death.
- Retribution. Retribution in this debate is the idea that the death penalty is needed to bring about justice for the victims, the victims’ families, and/or society at large.
Sep 21, 2011 · In some countries it is legal to kill someone if they have committed a terrible crime. This is called a death sentence, or the death penalty. It is not legal in Britain.
- It requires one person to kill another person. In an op-ed published by the New York Times, S. Frank Thompson discussed his experience in executing inmates while serving as the superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary.
- It comes with unclear constitutionality in the United States. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court of the United States found the application of the death penalty unconstitutional, but four years later, allowed the death penalty to resume with certain limitations on when and how it must be carried out.
- It does not have a positive impact on homicide rates. The United States implemented the death penalty 22 times in 2019, and imposed 34 death sentences.
- It creates a revenge factor, which may not best serve justice. No one can blame families of victims for wanting justice. There is enough reason because of their pain and loss to understand concepts like vengeance.
- It costs more to implement the death penalty than offer life in prison. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the average cost of a case without capital punishment involved is $740,000.
- It does not deter crime like it should. Data collected in the United States, as some states have capital punishment and others do not, shows that there is a clear discrepancy in the rates of violent crime.
- It does not provide a sense of justice for the families of a victim. Although capital punishment may be the “ultimate” form of justice, it does not provide the sense of satisfaction for the families of a victim that many people think it does.
- It is not the only way to ensure someone is never released from prison. The number of people serving life sentences in the United States is surging. About 162,000 people are currently serving a life sentence, which is 1 out of every 9 people.
- Overview
- Arguments for and against capital punishment
- Moral arguments
- Utilitarian arguments
- Practical arguments
- The abolition movement
Capital punishment has long engendered considerable debate about both its morality and its effect on criminal behaviour. Contemporary arguments for and against capital punishment fall under three general headings: moral, utilitarian, and practical.
Capital punishment has long engendered considerable debate about both its morality and its effect on criminal behaviour. Contemporary arguments for and against capital punishment fall under three general headings: moral, utilitarian, and practical.
Supporters of the death penalty believe that those who commit murder, because they have taken the life of another, have forfeited their own right to life. Furthermore, they believe, capital punishment is a just form of retribution, expressing and reinforcing the moral indignation not only of the victim’s relatives but of law-abiding citizens in general. By contrast, opponents of capital punishment, following the writings of Cesare Beccaria (in particular On Crimes and Punishments [1764]), argue that, by legitimizing the very behaviour that the law seeks to repress—killing—capital punishment is counterproductive in the moral message it conveys. Moreover, they urge, when it is used for lesser crimes, capital punishment is immoral because it is wholly disproportionate to the harm done. Abolitionists also claim that capital punishment violates the condemned person’s right to life and is fundamentally inhuman and degrading.
Although death was prescribed for crimes in many sacred religious documents and historically was practiced widely with the support of religious hierarchies, today there is no agreement among religious faiths, or among denominations or sects within them, on the morality of capital punishment. Beginning in the last half of the 20th century, increasing numbers of religious leaders—particularly within Judaism and Roman Catholicism—campaigned against it. Capital punishment was abolished by the state of Israel for all offenses except treason and crimes against humanity, and Pope John Paul II condemned it as “cruel and unnecessary.”
Supporters of capital punishment also claim that it has a uniquely potent deterrent effect on potentially violent offenders for whom the threat of imprisonment is not a sufficient restraint. Opponents, however, point to research that generally has demonstrated that the death penalty is not a more effective deterrent than the alternative sanction of...
There also are disputes about whether capital punishment can be administered in a manner consistent with justice. Those who support capital punishment believe that it is possible to fashion laws and procedures that ensure that only those who are really deserving of death are executed. By contrast, opponents maintain that the historical application ...
Under the influence of the European Enlightenment, in the latter part of the 18th century there began a movement to limit the scope of capital punishment. Until that time a very wide range of offenses, including even common theft, were punishable by death—though the punishment was not always enforced, in part because juries tended to acquit defendants against the evidence in minor cases. In 1794 the U.S. state of Pennsylvania became the first jurisdiction to restrict the death penalty to first-degree murder, and in 1846 the state of Michigan abolished capital punishment for all murders and other common crimes. In 1863 Venezuela became the first country to abolish capital punishment for all crimes, including serious offenses against the state (e.g., treason and military offenses in time of war). San Marino was the first European country to abolish the death penalty, doing so in 1865; by the early 20th century several other countries, including the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy, had followed suit (though it was reintroduced in Italy under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini). By the mid-1960s some 25 countries had abolished the death penalty for murder, though only about half of them also had abolished it for offenses against the state or the military code. For example, Britain abolished capital punishment for murder in 1965, but treason, piracy, and military crimes remained capital offenses until 1998.
During the last third of the 20th century, the number of abolitionist countries increased more than threefold. These countries, together with those that are “de facto” abolitionist—i.e., those in which capital punishment is legal but not exercised—now represent more than half the countries of the world. One reason for the significant increase in the number of abolitionist states was that the abolition movement was successful in making capital punishment an international human rights issue, whereas formerly it had been regarded as solely an internal matter for the countries concerned.
In 1971 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that, “in order fully to guarantee the right to life, provided for in…the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” called for restricting the number of offenses for which the death penalty could be imposed, with a view toward abolishing it altogether. This resolution was reaffirmed by the General Assembly in 1977. Optional protocols to the European Convention on Human Rights (1983) and to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1989) have been established, under which countries party to the convention and the covenant undertake not to carry out executions. The Council of Europe (1994) and the EU (1998) established as a condition of membership in their organizations the requirement that prospective member countries suspend executions and commit themselves to abolition. This decision had a remarkable impact on the countries of central and eastern Europe, prompting several of them—e.g., the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—to abolish capital punishment.
In the 1990s many African countries—including Angola, Djibouti, Mozambique, and Namibia—abolished capital punishment, though most African countries retained it. In South Africa, which formerly had one of the world’s highest execution rates, capital punishment was outlawed in 1995 by the Constitutional Court, which declared that it was incompatible with the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment and with “a human rights culture.”
- Roger Hood
Oct 15, 2024 · The pros and cons of the death penalty. Number of executions globally continues to rise even as more countries move to limit capital punishment. Anti-death penalty protesters...
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Oct 4, 2024 · Capital punishment, execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction by a court of law of a criminal offense. The term ‘death penalty’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘capital punishment,’ though imposition of the penalty is not always followed by execution. Learn more about capital punishment.
