Saved By Mercy By Martin Luther King

This clearly shows the cynicism that the death penalty consists of for by standers and victims. A well known quote “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind” shows how bitter and cynical the death penalty really is. Violence cannot be fought with more violence. Justice is important, but so is mercy and compassion. No person should be denied forgiveness and assistance to turn from his

“We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.” C.S. Lewis

1. Lex Talionis – The Criminal Justice Today textbook defines the term Lex Talionis as “The law of retaliation, often expressed as ‘an eye for an eye’ or ‘like for like’” (Schmalleger 414). Under Lex Talionis, the convicted offender was sentenced to suffer a punishment that closely approximated the original injury. This rule of “an eye for an eye, a tooth of a tooth,” generally duplicated the offense. Hence, if a person blinded another, he was blinded in return. Murderers were executed, sometimes in a way tailored to approximate the method they had used in committing the crime. It is ultimately the principle of retributive justice expressed in the phrase “an eye for an eye,” and the basis of this form of law is the principle of proportionate

Avoidance of physical punishment and deference to power. Punishment is an automatic response of physical retaliation. The immediate physical consequences of an action determine its goodness or badness. The atrocities carried out by soldiers during the holocaust who were simply "carrying out orders" under threat of punishment, illustrate that adults as well as children may function at stage one level. "Might makes right."

If you do something wrong, you receive a punishment, a price for your actions. In doing so, you should atone for your mistake in the same degree of punishment as is the action perpetrated. For example, if you commit murder, you deserve to be murdered. I believe in this theory just as much as I believe that the world is

This law of retaliation is taught throughout our entire childhood and applies universally. The golden rule of, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is just another way of phrasing this law. However, in order to prove the effectiveness of this law, we must apply to all circumstances in a situation. That’s when problems begin emerging. Questions about right and wrong, fair and unfair, just and unjust, and deciding who is to be the judge of the problems, are some of the troubles we face.

As mentioned before, this idea of justice

"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" which means if someone, for

Secondly, if you do not stand up against those evils then they will continue to do those evil things. As

Often, when a criminal is sentenced to the death penalty for committing a murder, people begin to question the legality and morality of it, and try to defend or attack it. One of the first few things that come to mind when people try to defend the death penalty is the statement, “an eye for an eye,” or the principle of lex talionis, meaning we treat people the way they have treated others (Textbook, 538). Although this argument is well-backed up, it does not always prove to be the best principle when determining the type of punishment, one deserves. Stephen Nathanson, an abolitionist to the death penalty, discusses this idea in his article “An Eye for and Eye,” specifically within his argument stating that equality retributivism does not justify the death penalty and that it should be rejected (Textbook, 539). Equality retributivism, which is the idea that we penalize criminals with punishments that are equal to their crimes, serves as a great principle for some crimes but not all. I find this statement, along with Nathanson’s argument, to be true because not all crimes can have a punishment equal to it. Throughout this paper, I will discuss Nathanson’s argument, some objections raised, and lastly, whether the objection succeeds or not.

All discipline has some point which serves to legitimize the affliction that is perpetrated on the wrongdoer (Baier & Fulhrmann, 2013). The principle points are revenge, weakening, recovery, and prevention. With revenge, discipline is a matter of what is merited in kind for a wrongful demonstration. The retributive hypothesis of discipline is frequently connected with the thought of "eye for and eye" equity, where the forced discipline is equivalent to the mischief done. The Latin expression for this is lex talionis, which actually signifies "law of countering" (Baier & Fulhrmann, 2013). Some of the time the "eye for an eye" idea of discipline is taken actually, for example, the accompanying from the old Babylonian Law of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BCE): "If a man puts out the eye of another man, then his eye might be put out. In the event that he breaks another man 's bone, then his bone might be broken." by all accounts, however, strict adherence to "eye for and eye" equity is primitive: we don 't rebuff attackers by assaulting them, or rebuff fire playing criminals by torching their homes (Baier & Fulhrmann, 2013). Or maybe, we look for change through more accommodating sorts of anguish that we can force on guilty parties.

Violence is all around us and drips into our lives and the stories we read. Joyce Carol

“Eye for an eye” is the coolest thing ever.Not all the victims have the chance or ability to revenge on those once harmed them.The way Monte Cristo does in the book is too easy for his enemies if someone did the same thing to me, I will probably lock them up in the dungeon or a mental hospital for the rest of their lives.

Many people use the moral reasoning of an eye for an eye to justify capital punishment. However this doesn’t work because a murderer would be murdered, a robber would be robbed, a thief would be stolen from, a drug dealer would be sold drugs and so on down the line for the rest of the infinite number of possible offenses. This doesn’t work because most of them wouldn't care if it was done back to them because they think it morally acceptable to commit these crimes and that they would just be having something that is morally acceptable done to them. Many criminals don't have super serious offenses that deserve to have an eye for an eye. For example, a drug dealer is probably addicted to drugs so to sell and make them use drugs would just be feeding the, addiction

There are five common approaches to punishments. The first one is deterrence. It’s basically saying that if people know that they will be punished for such a crime, then they will think twice about committing it. If no one ever got punished for robbing a bank, than everyone