Capital Punishment
...he must die. In this case, there is no
substitute that will satisfy the legal requirements of legal justice.There is no
sameness of kind between death and remaining alive even under the most miserable
conditions, and consequently there is no equality between crime and the
retribution unless the criminal is judicially condemned and put to death."
Immanuel Kant.
About 2000 men, women, and teenagers currently wait on America's "Death
Row." Their time grows shorter as federal and state courts increasingly ratify
death penalty laws, allowing executions to proceed at an accelerated rate. It's
unlikely that any of these executions will make the front page, having become
more and more a matter of routine in the last decade. Indeed, recent public
opinion polls show a wide margin of support for the death penalty. But human
rights advocates continue to decry the immorality of state-sanctioned killing in
the U.S., the only western industrialized country that continues to use the
death penalty. Is capital punishment moral?
Capital punishment is often defended on the grounds by the government,
that society has a moral obligation to protect the safety and the welfare of its
citizens. Murderers threaten this safety and welfare. Only by putting murderers
to death can society ensure that convicted killers do not kill again.
Second, those favoring capital punishment contend that society should
support those practices that will bring about the greatest balance of good over
evil, and capital punishment is one such practice. Capital punishment benefits
society because it may deter violent crime. While it is difficult to produce
direct evidence to support this claim since, by definition, those who are
deterred by the death penalty do not commit murders, common sense tells us...
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