Capital Punishment - Cruel and Inhumane? :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Capital Punishment - Cruel and Inhumane? After centuries of nearly universal implementation, the death penalty remains a deeply debated issue. While one execution takes place, other murders occur, and the question still stands: Will the death penalty safeguard society and deter murder, or will it not? The death penalty cannot be considered a proper economical and moral means of punishment to deter those who might commit capital offenses, or can it? In the past, capital punishment horrified people, which deterred them from committing crime. In England, the country from which the United States adopted the death penalty, the death penalty was imposed for a rather large number of offenses in an effort to discourage people from committing crimes. Methods of inflicting the death penalty have ranged "From stoning in biblical times, crucifixion under the Romans, beheading in France, to those used in the United States today: hanging, electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, and lethal injection"(Bedau 124). There were drastic penalties for such serious crimes as homicide. Execution was a suitable punishment for those times. Today, though, the law is not as strict. This leads potential criminals not to fear the death penalty because government today uses more "humane" methods of execution, rather than the brutal punishment that history portrayed. People who oppose the death penalty say that "there is no evidence that the murder rate fluctuates according to the frequency with which the death penalty is used" (Masur 153). It is more likely that the convict would be paroled instead of being executed because of the present practice of allowing unlimited appeals. Convicted criminals are not exposed to cruel punishment, but rather given a long waiting period. If the criminal is put to death, it is usually done as mercifully as possible. One problem with the death penalty, presently, is that crime is not decreasing, but rather increasing. If capital punishment is supposed to deter crimes such as murder, it is not serving its purpose. Even philosophers, such as Beccaria, Voltaire, and Bentham of the Enlightenment Period, argued that "the death penalty was needlessly cruel, overrated as a deterent, and occasionally imposed in fatal error" (Fogelson 89). Another problem with the death penalty is the enormous amount of money being spent on implementation. It costs taxpayers millions of dollars more to execute a criminal than to lock him up for life. The number of prisoners on death row has been steadily increasing and will soon meet all time highs. This fact brings up the question of economic feasibility of the implementation, as well as the question of weather the death penalty is actually an effective