Capital punishment is an injustice of society
Debate on capital punishment
A punishment can be an effective deterrent only if it is consistently and promptly employed. Image by Hugh Williams Image from www. The savings in time and money will prove to be illusory. In a typical passage from Scripture, the Psalmist, reflecting on the universality of guilt and the consequent universal need for pardon, writes, "If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt, Lord, who would survive? Maybe -- as Walker Percy would say -- the wrong questions are being asked. It epitomizes the tragic inefficacy and brutality of violence, rather than reason, as the solution to difficult social problems. Don then took several more quick gulps of the fumes. Since , in this country, there have been on the average more than four cases each year in which an entirely innocent person was convicted of murder.InJesse Tafero was executed in Florida. Rather, Black communities, as a whole, suffer a distributive injustice under the criminal justice system's use of the death penalty.
A person's rightful due is to be treated as an object of love. It was underpinned by special statutory provisions which enabled the fast-tracking of procedures and thus significantly increased the number of cases liable to attract the death penalty.
The opinion that murder, especially when premeditated and particularly cruel, necessarily requires the death penalty as the only commensurate chastisement, cannot be sustained. By all accounts, the death penalty is on the decline.
Mandatory death sentencing is unconstitutional. Several initiatives have already been taken in this direction. Eleven of these men are currently on death row, while one man died of medical neglect at the hands of prison caretakers "Justice" Shortly after, another man serving a life term in prison for similar crimes confessed that he alone was guilty; but his confession was inadmissible because he refused to repeat it in court unless the state waived the death penalty against him.
Furthermore, the death penalty is a futile threat for political terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh, because they usually act in the name of an ideology that honors its martyrs.
Opponents of capital punishment frequently indicate God's dealing with Cain after his crime of fratricide as a counter-example to the mandate of the death penalty in the Pentateuch.
We can reduce delay and costs only by abandoning the procedural safeguards and constitutional rights of suspects, defendants, and convicts — with the attendant high risk of convicting the wrong person and executing the innocent.
Some would argue that with the serious social and moral problems we face, most especially the scourge of abortion, with all the truly innocent victims of violent crime and the modern tendency to turn criminals into victims and vice-versa, efforts to abolish capital punishment are wrongheaded, or at least misdirected.