Persuasion against Capital Punishment - Research Paper Example

Outline Introduction.................................................................................................................2 Anti-death penalty debate...........................................................................................2 What recent literature reveals?...................................................................................3 Ethical and Moral Reflections.....................................................................................3 Opinion of Human Rights Agencies............................................................................4 Wrongful executions...................................................................................................5 Consequences of Inevitability of error.........................................................................5 In the light of Racial Oppression.................................................................................6 Unidentified Executions..............................................................................................7 Death penalty cultural significance.............................................................................7 Fiscal factors that increases execution costs..............................................................8 Critics and future Capital Punishments.......................................................................9 Implications in the light of policies..............................................................................11 Persuasion against Capital Punishment The death penalty or capital punishment presents American society with a myriad of contradictions, which in the terrain of unresolved tensions characterizes the moment of terror (Haney 2005, p. 3). It is declared as a sensitive issue which is prioritized on the human rights agenda and has been declared as the most inhumane act practiced by most of the civilized nations. Research suggests that it is already abolished by 106 countries of which 30 are those that have abolished since the last two decades (Human Rights, 2009). The concern that rises here is that why so many countries including the United States have swallowed the truth that long-term imprisonment is better than execution. However, there are nations that still believe the effectiveness of death penalty that is proliferated and practiced in many countries throughout the world among which China, Japan, Middle Eastern nations along with United States are the most prolific executioners in the world. Being a significant subject of controversy, this paper discusses the anti-death penalty stance by debating on the execution consequences that often left a dubious mark on the personalities of the innocent after being executed and in this manner many innocents not only loose their lives but are also labeled as offenders. Death penalty, for many of Americans offers discrimination between minorities and the socially deprived and violates the right of the offender to survive. Pro-capitalists claim that penalty is the tantamount justification for offenders that by proving the principle of retribution, are liable to acquire death instead of imprisonment. This paper answers all the questions pertaining to abolishing death penalty in the United States and proves that execution is no longer a solution to alleviate crime, long-term imprisonment is a better method instead. Recent literature on the death penalty is confined to the issue of wrongful convictions. However, there are other aspects that are often overlooked while determining the legitimacy of capital punishment. These issues pertain to racial prejudice while raising the concern over the failure of history to justify innocent execution. This may be illustrated by analyzing case histories of innocent defendants freed from death row or of a recidivist murderer. Whatsoever, the history reveals about death penalty, the considerable ordeal with both the theoretical and the practical aspects of the subject is a result of unusual exposure and accessibility for a diverse public audience. Ethical and Moral Reflections on Capital Punishment Philosophers declare death penalty as a punishment rooted in hopelessness and anger and perhaps they are right in their opinion to the extent where a jury decides about the fate of offenders survival. Though many religious leaders believe that every individual in the society is responsible for building a community, therefore an offender must be punished for whatever crime he has committed. But to presume from this notion that the individual is liable to be punished in terms of choosing death for him as a substitute, is not justified ethically or morally. It is not justified for the philosophical reason that no person is just a crime. Instead he commits to what a society declares some acts as social crimes. Many religions in order to maintain a social order declare death punishment as a social obligation to acquire peace and justice in the society, but if we look at the advent of the world, we realize that crime started the day when Adam was born and it continues to proliferate to this day, where injustice rules the world. Human rights agencies oppose death punishment to be constrained by long-term imprisonment and this is so because in United States where the criminal justice system is repleted with capricious and unfair decision making, the poor and those who have been the subjects of discrimination, suffers. For those who have suffered through racial discrimination, who will answer their emotions over violence and death of their family members? Those who have lost loved ones to crime are the subjects of anguish who in turn emanate a pessimist attitude towards a society. Such pessimism vengeances others to whom they feel responsible for the execution of their loved ones. And what if those who are executed have been the victims of inevitable error? Who will answer the sons and daughters over the loss of executed prisoners? It is obvious that an increasing number of decision makers who have become disillusioned by the process of state governments executing human beings have come to believe that whatever ones views of the death penalty, reasonable people if equipped with the facts about how the death penalty is actually practiced in this country, ought to conclude that the death penalty should be abolished (Bedau & Cassell 2004, p. 77). Inevitability of Wrongful Executions Wrongful executions often witness innocent defendants that are been convicted and sentenced to death, instead of being imprisoned. This is, because of the fact that whenever executions remain impersonal and unexamined, Americans are stereotyped to consider capital punishment as an alternate to abolish crime in which death-sentenced prisoners are villains lacking humanity. Since these villains are devoid of understanding humanistic approach, they are instead of teaching human values by subjecting to long-term imprisonments, are declared to experience inhuman behavior. The inevitability of error in recent years have been raised and the onus rests on the shoulders of media for taking into account exoneration of death row that reports about the unreliability of the capital punishment system in a unique but true manner. While disclosing some of the realities of the death penalty to the public consciousness, the media has revealed evidences that this new information is beginning to transform the public and decision makers school of thoughts about the death penalty. Only in the last few years decision makers have witnessed that dozens of innocent Americans in the name of justice have been released from death row after escaping execution. Bedau & Adam (2004, p. 78) while acknowledging the facts behind wrongful execution points out that since the resumption of death penalty in the U.S. in the 1970s witnessed alone that out of eight persons one person was discovered to be innocent and on the death row to be exonerated. Another consequence of capital punishment is the vigilante attitude of the government that loses credibility of protecting the citizenry. Those who find themselves in the middle of the debate hold due process attitudes that worry instead about a government that is too powerful, one that might exercise that power against its citizens in an arbitrary manner. The due process mindset that many of us possess holds that power to inflict punishment is prone to be abused in many ways. Citizens blame the government to falsely accuse and wrongly punish them for crimes they did not commit (Zimring 2003, p. 122). In this case, even government can also make mistakes in determining how much punishment guilty offenders deserve. Capital Punishment in the light of Racial Discrimination Although the advocates for and against death penalty have conflicted opinions pertaining to punishment for a person who kills another person and no doubt execution polls show more support for the death penalty than opinions against it. But what scholars like Bedau and Cassell (2004, p. 153) describes the death penalty is an illustration that reveals the presence of black spots left on American history in which slavery, lynching and racial oppression have been a salient feature of capital punishment. It is obvious that the death sentence is neither imposed to avenge every killing, nor is used as a tool to torture the family of the victim, but is enforced in less than 1 percent of all murder cases in the United States. Bedau & Cassell (2004, p. 153) points out to the facts that an average rate of murder in the United States is more than 20,000 annually of which fewer than 300 people are sentenced to death while 55 are executed each year. Advocates believe that an assessment of the death penalty must not be based on unidentified executions, vague justifications and abstract theories. To understand the realities behind death systems functioning there is a need to focus on the laws and processes that sentence people to death by the hundreds and have implemented executions on the basis of inadequate procedures to protect the innocents. Such procedures that carry out executions impact even innocent people to affect from death sentences and their death is usually based on such things as wrongful eyewitness identifications, false confessions, false convictions not supported by science, failure of police and prosecutors to turn over evidence of innocence and testimony of unreliable prisoners in order to get their own charges dismissed by testifying that the accused admitted the crime to them. Cultural Loophole A cultural ordeal perceives death sentence in a unique manner on which Michael (2004) has highlighted by memorizing those who became the victims of September 11 crimes. Pointing towards the significance of death sentence in international terrorism, Michael suggests that since terrorists are exposed to a complex and ill psychology, death is no longer an issue to them. The September 11 crimes are an illustration where the magnitude of killing over 3,000 innocent people no doubt was a massacre for retribution. In this case we can analyze how the emergence of a suicide bomber turns the death penalty for justification inside out (Michael, 2004). This indicates that death penalty has been used to create martyrs which on one hand encourage the other terrorists to proceed with their terrorist activities comprised of bombing and killing innocents while on the other, it creates so-called martyrs instead of terrorists. Such attitude by no means discourage terrorists, so the point to contemplate is that could our imposed death penalty possess the ability to seize activist parties like Al Qaeda and other extremist groups? Increasing Costs of Capital Punishment Systems The death penalty is considered to be among one of the facts that drain scarce resource from the legal penal system. In this context elimination of capital punishment will work and fulfill not only the humanitarian reform, but it will be counted as an effective strategy toward controlling a future crime without extra costs. Traditional death penalty opponents also consider the incapacitating costs, that incur on the execution and realizes that the overall process that works in a capital case is considerably more expensive than putting the offenders behind the bars. This is so, because the funds the process requires to prosecute a capital case and afterwards the efforts involved to sustain it through various mandated appeals has been shown as enormous in almost every state of America (Haines 1996, p. 169). Haines (1996, p. 169) suggests that the basic hypothesis behind the decision of the jury to seek a death sentence requires intensive effort in investigations, extensive efforts in filing longer hearings of pretrial motions, and greater likelihood of requesting expensive psychiatric and medical evaluations of defendants. Extensive investigations and higher proportion of appeals along with maintenance and purchasing costs for execution equipment with training costs for execution staff are those costs that incur in all cases where there is a probability of death sentence, irrespective of being successful or unsuccessful. The worst financial impact of the death penalty occurs when the taxpayers scrutinizes a costly trial and after determining trial costs implement the tax on jury for which often lawyers try to convince jury for taking action in favor of their clients and send them to prisons, instead of executing them. What actually happens is that taxes on jury are applied by determining the number of people that a state attempts to execute and not the number of executions that actually take place. That indicates what matters is the decision of jury and not the action. Thus, we can say that there is not one reason to think about the abolishment of capital punishment. Besides being an immoral and inhuman practice, it is an unwise and counterproductive criminal justice policy which despite many consequences, over the years have been strengthening its position. Although anti-death penalty is not a new approach, since moral or humanitarian claims have dominated abolitionism from the beginning and various governments have supported it, but to the extent where this issue has never remained on the top list of governments priority. Critics and Future Capital Punishments Critics claim that most of the death sentences are the outcomes of the relationship between the state and racial and ethnic minorities because it is through racial implicit or explicit policies that state institutions manage to enforce their everyday political affairs (Urbina 2003, p. 41). The symposium over wrongful convictions presents two common criticisms on American innocents, one from a religious perspective and the other from advocate of abolition of death penalty. One opposing perspective by Steiker & Steiker (2005) is that the self-described agnostic person never finds anything distinctive about the problem of wrongful death in the capital punishment because the cost of the execution of few innocent people is not sufficient to implement capital punishment. This is so, because it is comparable to the everyday deaths that occur on the undertaking of an important social project that a government takes such as building a bridge or constructing a dam (Steiker & Steiker, 2005). Furthermore, the author mentions the example of Joshua Marquis who being a supporter of capital punishment claims that the problem is not with the death of few innocents, in fact it is the problem of overestimating the actual number of clean-handed people convicted and sentenced to die because their true true number, while not zero, is still low enough to consider an acceptable cost of a valuable social policy (Steiker & Steiker, 2005). There are two implications that determine the value conflict behind the death penalty debate and that are the efforts to utilize American courts and the initiation of a new political process to end executions. The question of capital punishment addresses this ideology as a dangerous and terrorized doctrine that psychologically frights execution prisoners. It is not to claim that offenders or murderers should not be punished but in an execution free zone where states camouflages extreme governmental power instead of neutral public service that misrepresents a worthy enemy. The scope of capital punishment in American law and political context considers the cross-currents of policy reforms in the 1990s as a case history of conflict between inconsistent value traditions. Inconsistent, because when the two major policy campaigns of the 1990s attempted to decide about death penalty, they resulted in only speeding up the process to execution and the effort to discover innocent defendants on death row and deliver them from wrongful execution (Zimring 2003, p. 141). The policies, in other words, initiated two contradictory processes which on one hand lifted executions, instead of making attempts to eradicate while on the other hand, it started efforts to prevent inevitable executions. First, both these attempts were two contradictory steps taken to achieve each of these goals and secondly, one policy worked only to defeat the other objective. This is by no means a solution or a substitute. Policies must be in context with the developments in national politics and in the light of judiciary, which alter the death penalty system to stop executions. Abolition requires various strategies to practice and support the specific objectives of future American abolitionist campaigns. Works Cited Bedau Hugo Adam & Cassell G. Paul. Debating the Death Penalty: Should America Have Capital Punishment? The Experts on Both Sides Make Their Best Case: Oxford University Press: New York, 2004. Haines H. Herbert. Against Capital Punishment: The Anti-Death Penalty Movement in America, 1972-1994: Oxford University Press: New York, 1996. Haney Craig. Death by Design: Capital Punishment as Social Psychological System: Oxford University Press: New York, 2005. Human Rights, 2009. 15 June 2009 Michael, Mcdonnell Thomas. “The Death Penalty - an Obstacle to the “War against Terrorism”?” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 37:2 (2004): 353. Steiker S. Carol & Steiker M. Jordan. “The Seduction of Innocence: The Attraction and Limitations of the Focus on Innocence in Capital Punishment Law and Advocacy”. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 95:2 (2005): 587. Urbina G. Martin. Capital Punishment and Latino Offenders: Racial and Ethnic Differences in Death Sentences: LFB Scholarly Publishing: New York, 2003. Zimring E. Franklin. The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment: Oxford University Press: New York, 2003. Read More