Question

Need help!!!! Need a thesis for being against the death penalty

Answer 1

There are typically four:

(1) It doesn't work. People who make this argument say that the death penalty does not reduce the rate of murder and extremely violent crime, because people who commit those crimes are driven to it by other factors -- bad upbringing, passion, drugs -- and aren't thinking rationally about the possible outcomes. No murderer plans on being caught, so what happens to them after their caught doesn't impact their thinking. The only way to reduce murder is to address the "root causes" and so forth.

Murray and Herrnstein in their famous book ("The Bell Curve") made this point in part quite forcefully, by proving exhaustively that the criminal justice system is largely inhabited by people with substantially lower intelligence than normal, and that a system built around ideas, rewards and punishments that make sense to the normal adult mind won't necessarly work -- because you're not dealing with that.

To the extent there is any actual data, my vague recollection is that, considered most honestly -- and many studies are inherently dishonest, becauset they have axes to grind -- the death penalty has a slight deterrent effect, meaning where it exists it tends to reduce the amount of violent crime. This is hardly surprising -- if criminal punishment has any point at all, it MUST be because it has a deterrent effect. It's a little weird to say that life imprisonment has a deterrent effect, but the death penalty does not. That defies common sense. You can, of course, argue that *no* punishment has a deterrent effect, and the only reason to have jail is to keep criminals separate from society so they don't commit more crimes. But few would go so far.

An additional problem is that efforts to address "root causes" -- by, e.g. antipoverty programs, job programs, public housing, the war on drugs, anti-gang initiatives -- have all been tried, and their results are pretty poor. The sad truth is that almost everybody who grows up poor, disadvantaged, abused, et cetera does NOT grow up to be a criminal or murderer -- so there clearly cannot be a straight cause-and-effect relationship between being disadvantaged and criminality. There has to be some individual element. But we don't know what it is, and even if we did, if we start thinking about interfering with individuals based on some individual element that predisposed them to criminality, we're headed off into Department of Precrime territory and most people don't like that idea.

(2) It's immoral. You can't teach respect for life by killing, and so forth. This is often presented as the second argument after the first argument (above) has been met with (from death-penalty supporters) the counter-argument that, whether it works or not, we have a moral obligation to mete out the most severe punishment to the most horrible criminals. That is, if people decide whether it works in a practical sense isn't the point, they often fall back next to the point of whether it is moral or not, regardless of how effective it is.

This tends to be a fairly jejeune argument, I think. If it were true that you can't teach respect for life by killing, then it would also follow that you can't teach respect for liberty by imprisonment, and you can't teach respect for property by fines, and so we can't punish kidnapping by imprisonment or theft by forcing someone to pay restitution. We're reduced to nothing more than setting good examples or offering rewards -- all carrot and no stick. Carried to its logical conclusion, it says we should all be pacifists, unwilling to ever use force, even agaisnt great evil. That leaves a lot of people queasy.

(3) It has evil moral effects on people in general, and that outweighs any moral benefit from executing evil people. It cheapens life, contributes to a culture of death, et cetera. Essentially this argues that in a culture where it is acceptable to put men to death for crimes, it is easier to, for example, wage aggressive war, or kill retarded people or euthanize old people, or abort unborn children, et cetera. One legally-justified death eases the conscience for the next.

(4) It's impractical. Even if it could theoretically serve as a deterrent, and even if it's moral, we lack the means to do it at reasonable cost and without error. This argument points out the enormous cost of death penalty trials and appeals -- generally larger than life imprisonment -- and the fact that a handful of people have actually been released from death row by factual proof of innocence. (There is a DNA analysis program called "The Innocence Project" that has a lot of visibility here.) We can't afford to execute the innocent, because this would be a great moral wrong, so we must be 100% sure we execute the right person, and that costs enormously, or we can't do it at all -- can't be 100.0000% right. People also point out death is irreversible, you can't undo it if you find you made a mistake later.

The diffulcty with this argument is it devalues the cost we impose in criminals in non-capital cases. Why should we really care a lot less about being 100% right when we are talking about sending a man to prison for 30 years (as former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky just was)? Is this any less an act of barbarity than execution if it is done in error? The entire argument rests on an valuing life qua life, even if it is the degraded and diminished life of a man in prison, as exquisitely more valuable than, say, freedom or dignity. That's a fairly squalid point of view -- it says, roughly speaking, there is nothing worth dying for, including your own crimes. Most people would like to think there are higher moral callings than simply preserving your life, and that society should reflect those values. Therefore, there SHOULD be things you can do that society should decide are worth your life, and possibly taking someone else's life -- or many lives, or a child's, or in a particularly horrible or senseless way, or if you are in a position of responsibility and trust -- should be one of them.

I should mention that there are also people who feel that the question of whether the death penalty is moral or not is inextricably tied to how it is carried out. For example, is it moral for a police sharpshooter to kill a man holding a young child hostage? That's the death penalty, right there -- he isn't shooting to wound, he's intending to kill, and he does. Now what if the man lets the child go, but flees and won't heed commands to stop -- he's in danger of getting away, perhaps to do the same again. Is it moral for a chasing policeman to shoot to kill? Finally, what if the man is trapped, cornered, and can't escape, and can be apprehended, but perhaps not without some danger -- maybe he's carrying a knife and won't drop it. Shoot to kill? Only the final situation, where he is disarmed and completely helpless, and then we decide to strap him to a gurney and inject him with lethal drugs is the classic death penalty case. But we should not overlook the fact that there are many other "death penalty" cases that are decided in different ways, often by law enforcement in a split second, plus how we arm and instruct our law enforcement. Some would argue *that* kind of death penalty is moral, because it is made in an urgent situation, to solve a problem -- the protection of innocent life -- that cannot be solved any other way.