Death penalty - Essay Example

The paper concludes that there is no beneficial deterrent effect from the death penalty and should be abolished on moral grounds. No act carries more moral gravity and wields greater social impact than the intentional taking of another persons life. It is for this reason that state-sanctioned killing, by way of the death penalty, has been one of the most important issues facing the American justice system during the past century. The debate on capital punishment weighs the morality of the most extreme form of punishment against the benefit to society that it serves by acting as a deterrent to the most egregious criminal acts.

The issue of the death penalty is an emotionally charged issue where both sides are able to point to data to support their political or social viewpoint. Advocates of the death penalty point out the retributive quality of the act and the need for society to gain its just punishment for the deviant act of murder. Supporters will further argue that empirical data supports the contention that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to crime. However, retributive justice serves no social utility and the death penalty does not act as a deterrent t to the crime of murder.

Nearly all the credible and rational research in recent years on the deterrent quality of capital punishment has concluded that it has only marginal, if any effect. In fact, the crime of murder is so impacted by the variables of passion, greed, fear, and anger that the effect of an eventual penalty for committing the crime is difficult to weigh. In numerous studies of the period of post 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court, researchers "invariably conclude that the death penalty has no discernable general deterrent effects beyond those conferred by long prison terms" (Jacobs & Carmichael, 2004, p.272). The data has shown no