Capital Punishment

Has capital punishment outlived its usefulness? Capital punishment is one of the hottest debates of the century and is likely to continue this way as long as the death penalty is an option as punishment for those who commit heinous crimes. Using the death penalty as a deterrent is one of the key issues in this debate however, the broader issue for the United States is whether or not society will be better off with no capital punishment system in place to protect the innocent from those who commit heinous crimes.

There have been many articles published on capital punishment that speak on both sides of this issue but the one question that is very difficult to find an answer to is; what are the effects on society of having no capital punishment system at all? Many believe that the death penalty is the only way to be sure that the killing stops with the criminal. Skeptics claim there have been too many cases where someone has been convicted and sentenced to death only to find years later, with new technologies such as DNA testing, this person was innocent. According to Liptak (2007), opponents of the death penalty say there have been more than 120 death row exonerations in the past twenty years.

There are many controversial arguments for and against the death penalty. In this section we are going to take a look at arguments against the death penalty.

According to Clark (2007), the most important reason for being against the death penalty is the virtual certainty that genuinely innocent people will be executed and that there is no possible way of compensating them for this miscarriage of justice. This is most definitely a very real concern for all involved in cases where the death penalty is a possibility. Clark (2007) also states "the person convicted of murder may have actually killed the victim and may even admit doing so but does not agree that the killing was murder."