Capital punishment is an issue that has been used to handle severe crimes in nearly every country either now or in the past. Even though I understand both sides of capital punishment, I can not morally say that it’s good. Though many say that the death penalty is the only way to go , it can not be justified because it is not morally correct to punish people with death. I have to take away how i feel and base my opinion on my morals. I do not think it is humane to use the death penalty as a form of punishment.
It goes against what i think of as being morally right. Killing someone to teach people that killing is wrong does not work, It’s hypocritical. In the article by Mary E. Williams she makes a very good point. “To this cycle of retributive vengeance there is no end. In the words of Mohandas Gandhi, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. “”(Williams). I understand the want for revenge and the feeling that because that person killed it’s only fair for them to be killed but that just creates a cycle of murder.
If we really want to end the killing we need to find a way that we can punish people fairly and in a humane way. People who support capital punishment use arguments saying it deters crime and prevents murder. In the book by Jeff Jacoby he presents evidence to support his claims. “Obviously, murder and the rate at which it occurs are affected by more than just the presence or absence of the death penalty. But even after taking that caveat into account, it seems irrefutably clear that when murderers are executed, innocent lives are saved”(Jacoby).
This is not the only argument for capital punishment. Some others might argue that “the death penalty is not a form of punishment that may never be imposed, regardless of the circumstances of the offense, regardless of the procedure followed in reaching the decision to impose it. Further-more, the infliction of death as a punishment for murder is not without justification, thus is not unconstitutionally severe”(Weier). which makes sense. Though if we are to look at how the world has gone in circles and history repeat itself over and over we should learn.
We know that revenge is not right and that it doesn’t fix anything but that’s practically what the death penalty is. I understand the want for capital punishment and the arguments supporting it. If someone was to kill my mother i would want them to die. I would lose all reason because all i would be able to focus on was my revenge, my thoughts would not be on if it was humane or cruel. I would try to find statistics to prove that “… when we can clearly see that the two numbers mirror each other, consistently over a period of almost fifty years, attributing this to coincidence gets pretty hard to believe.
The obvious conclusion from looking at the statistics, without any fancy “analysis” or “factoring out of other factors,” is that capital punishment does deter murder”(Johansen). Even with this knowledge i know that the death penalty is not right. We can not just kill someone to punish them. Punishments are meant to teach the person what they did was wrong in hopes that they will not do it again. How are we teaching anything if we are committing the same crime we are condemning. We forget that they are still human beings no matter the crime they committed. “The death penalty is disgusting. I have been there. I have watched my clients die.
And I will spend the rest of my life doing my best to make sure it does not happen to individual human beings who I have come to know”(Williams). In no way am i saying that they should not receive no punishment at all but morally I can not support the killing of another person no matter the crime they commit. Through the years the death penalty has been debated over and over again. It has even been used throughout history. I believe that capital punishment is a cruel and unusual punishment that should be abolished not because that person does not deserve a terrible punishment but because it is not morally right to punish someone with death.
