preview

The Death Penalty Has a Positive Effect on Society

Decent Essays

The Death Penalty Has a Positive Effect on Society

A thirty five year old white male kidnaps and rapes two sisters, one eight years old and the other eleven. The man then brutally murders the two helpless children; letting one watch as the other one was killed. He then leaves the bloody and beaten bodies, of the innocent sisters, in the neighborhood playground. Does this man deserve to die? The death penalty is a necessary evil that has a positive effect on society today. The death penalty should be sought in cases that carry the death penalty as a form of punishment because retribution should be taken for the heinous crimes that are committed, people that commit crime or kill will do it again, and the death penalty deters crime. …show more content…

"Life imprisonment also becomes underserved over time. A person who committed a murder when twenty years old and is executed within five years--far too long and cruel a delay in my opinion--is, when executed, still the person who committed the crime for which he is punished. His identity changes little in five years. However, a person who committed a murder when he was twenty years old and is kept in prison when sixty years old, is no longer the same person who committed the crime for which he is still being punished. The sexagenarian is unlikely to have much in common with the twenty-year-old for whose act he is being punished; his legal identity no longer reflects reality. Personality and actual identity are not that continuous. In effect, we punish an innocent sexagenarian who does not deserve punishment, instead of a guilty twenty-year-old who did. This spectacle should offend our moral sensibilities more than the deserved execution of the twenty-year-old. Those who deserve the death penalty should be executed while they deserve it, no kept in prison when thy no longer deserve any punishment" (van den Haag, 213).
There is documented fact that, once out on parole, former inmates will commit crime again. In 1969, Stanton studied five hundred fourteen murderers convicted of second-degree murder. After parole, 115 of those studied violated parole, two by murdering again

Get Access