Capital Punishment Essay - Christians and the Death Penalty

month later, in January 1977, the first execution under the new death penalty laws took place in the United States, ending the moratorium of capital punishment that began in 1967. Since that time, there have been many studies and public opinion polls to determine the effectiveness of the death penalty. When a Gallup poll asked those who were pro-death penalty to explain the reason for their position, most of them said that the death sentence was an effective deterrent of crime, it was more economic…

should have the death penalty. They believe that the death penalty keeps people from committing crimes. Most of these people today think that people will get scared of being executed by gas or needle and that they won’t commit real bad crimes. A lot of other people believe that it is just plain wrong to kill someone and no one should be killed for any reason even murder and rape and so they are against the death penalty. I will talk to you about these problems with the death penalty in my paper.…

deterred; but who is there who knows whom it has deterred, or how many human beings it has saved who would have [without the threat of the death penalty] lived to be murderers?" For reasons such as these, it is difficult to use the efficacy (or lack thereof) of the death penalty to either support or oppose its application. Basing the permissibility of the death penalty is similar to gambling; its proponents gamble with the lives of criminals that it does, in fact, have a deterrence effect; it's opponents…

Hammurabi's Code, as well as the Bible referred to "eye for an eye." "Proponents and opponents of capital punishment probably concede that there is an element of revenge in retributive justice-maybe the largest element in it-and that it may be the reason for the masses' continued support for the death penalty." (Hook 82) As societies have advanced, however, the act of killing a murderer seems to be the only act for which we maintained this vengeful idea. We do not rape the rapist, abuse and abuser…

For example, many people think the death penalty is a racial situation. Studies have shown this perception to be true as one study concluded that "over the past century, black offenders, as compared with white offenders, were often executed for crimes less often receiving the death penalty, such as rape and burglary" (Death Penalty). Another example is that the death penalty can be seen as sex discriminating and socio-economically discriminating. "During the 1980's and aerially 1990's only about…

Cesare Beccaria wrote On Crimes and Punishment, a book criticizing torture and the death penalty, in 1764. Cesare drove many other philosophers, like Voltaire and Jerry Bentham, to question the validity of using capital punishment. (Bedau2) Contrary to what some may believe the process of sentencing a defendant is a very arduous and time-taking ordeal. After he has been arrested as the suspect of a crime the defendant will either tried in a state or federal court system. The lowest court that a litigant…

Herman entered the death chamber with the bandages, visible above the collar of his blue shirt. Mr. Herman was condemned for the murder of 21-year-old Jennifer Burns. He critically shot two other people and left them seriously wounded at a topless bar in Arlington. Clay Griffin, who was shot in the head and arm, and Fogle , shot in the jaw, survived to testify against him. Herman, a former manager of the club, bound Fogleís hands with a wire coat hanger and ordered her to lie face down…

The Illinois death penalty moratorium enacted in 1999 was an intelligent response to one state's miserable record in the application of justice. The student journalists who worked to free a number of wrongly convicted men on the state's death row may have been sharp, but they were far from young Alan Dershowitzes. This raises the question: how did these poor slobs slip through the cracks for all these years? The evidence which originally "convicted" them was in several cases extremely thin, based…

safeguarded by the death penalty? The answer must be no. Let us leave aside the fact that the law of retaliation is inapplicable and that it would seem just as excessive to punish the incendiary by setting fire to his house as it would be insufficient to punish the thief by deducting from his bank account a sum equal to his theft. Let us admit that it is just and necessary to compensate for the murder of the victim by the death of the murderer. But beheading is not simply death. It is just as different…

were sentenced to death (BJS 5-93). 31 (one female) of the 2,575 (36 female) murderers had been executed during 1992. This is the largest number of people executed for any year since 1976 (BJS 12-92). By executing these murders, the American tax money could be used for something more useful. Thus the economy benefits from the death penalty. Plus, it helps lower the prison population by the number executed. The average time a death row prisoner has to spend in jail until the death sentence is carried…