Death Penalty: An Effective Element of The Justice System Essays

48-year sentence for the 1973 murder of a cab driver when he escaped a road work gang and stabbed to death a storekeeper named Gadys Nopwasky in a 1988 robbery that netted $4.00. This could have all be prevented if he was executed. Abolitionists claim that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent when it comes to crime. (Schwarzchild, 655) They say that the states with the death penalty have a higher rate of crime. The problem with this is that every state is different, each state…

analyzing different arguments for and against the death penalty, such as the "fear of death" myth, the cost of the death penalty, and the racial and economic bias of the death penalty, it can be shown that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent of crime. The deterrence argument states that, "although executing the murderer neither prevents the death of the victim nor restores their life, instating the death penalty effectively prevents the deaths of other victims" (Nathanson, 1987). On the…

handing out death sentences, the death penalty will be unable to fulfill its primary function as a murder deterrent. The death penalty also needs to become a more streamlined process. Currently, its takes an average of ten years for an actual death sentence to be carried out (Schonebaum 8). With all these appeals, the death sentence becomes very costly and loses its initial impact on the public. If a person knows that if they murder someone they will receive the death penalty, this person…

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…

To do this, the punishment for crime must be harsh enough to deter potential criminals. Under this mindset, the death penalty makes perfect sense. Here is a punishment that truly makes a criminal pay for his crime, stops the criminal from committing it again, and deters other criminals from committing the same crime. The punishment for murder is getting to be shorter and shorter. A judge could sentence a man to life in prison. That same man could be out of jail with 15 years. How has life…

comments that "Common sense?. tells us that the death penalty will deter murder, if anything can. People fear nothing more than death". Imagine that one was planning to kill a person who you lost to millions of money in an enterprise but at the same time that person knew that if he or she got caught it would lead to a 7-year prison term? Imagine again that one is in the same situation but at the same time one is aware that it would mean the death penalty if you he or she caught? Few people would choose…

Arguments against the death penalty: The death penalty has a lot of problems. What if someone was executed one day, and then a year later, thanks to new technology; they find that the person executed was in fact innocent! They cannot then just release him from jail because he is dead. This is not a fictional scenario either because we all know that in today's changing world, technological advancements are not uncommon. What would they then say to the family of victims, the murdered and wrongly…

No man should be able to “play God.” They way that the world works today, people are getting themselves in trouble by trying to be that powerful. This is many of the reasons of why so many other countries have abolished the death penalty according to Eric Neumayer. Take for example Bin Laden or Hitler or even Castro, all of these men all wanted to have total power and they got it however, Because they had total power their people turned on them and took away their power. If the government continues…

arguments for the death penalty is that it does deter crime. U. S. Department of Justice F. B. I. statistical data supports this point by highlighting the fact that most criminals released back into society commit additional felonies. Indeed, two out of three death row inmates had prior felony convictions, and one in twelve actually had been convicted of prior homicides (Snell). Removing any chance of further contact with innocent human beings, by carrying out the sentence of death, effectively assures…

awaiting execution are not guilty, but it is worth noting that 87 men have been freed from death row since 1977, with three already released this year. • A newly-released study of 62 inmates cleared by DNA evidence demonstrates that mistaken eyewitness testimony was involved in 84% of the wrongful convictions (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/16/00). • A February 2000 Gallup Poll showed that death-penalty support is at a 19-year low. • The United States is the only Western democracy that still…