Death Penalty in America

The death penalty is the punishment used in 38 states, and many

other countries, as a way of disposing the people in society who are

mentally or emotionally disturbed, love their families very much, have a

bad temper, or just plain made a mistake. These reasons account for many

homicides that take place each year. Capitol Punishment is just not humane

and should not be legal.

The argument most often used to support the death penalty in

former-Soviet republics is the necessity of having a particularly

efficacious deterrent against murders and other common crimes. However,

none of the many studies about the matter have been able to show that death

penalty is more of a deterrent than other punishments. It's completely

wrong to think that most of those who commit serious crimes such as murders

consider the consequences of their actions. Murders are often committed

when the criminal is blinded with passion, when emotions prevail over

reason. They are sometimes committed under the influence of drugs or

alcohol, or in panic moments, when the culprit is discovered while he

steals, as I mentioned already. Some murderers have very serious

psychiatric problems or are mental patients. In none of these cases is it

possible that the fear to be sentenced to death could act as an effective

deterrent.

There is another heavy limit. One who plans a crime rationally can

choose to go on, although he knows the risk he's running, thinking that he

won't be discovered. Most of the criminologists assert that the best way to

discourage murderers isn't increasing the severity of punishment, but

increasing the possibility of discovering the crime and condemning the

culprit. This will take care of the truly deserving people, who know and

understand what they are doing.

Sometimes death penalty has opposite effects to the ones wanted.

Those who know they risk to be sentenced to death can be encouraged to kill

the witnesses of their crime or anyone who could be able to identify and

incriminate them. To prevent their own death, they would kill again, and

eventually get away with the preliminary murder.

Data about crime in abolitionist countries doesn't prove at all

that the abolishment of death penalty has provoked its rise. In 1988 the UN

Board for Crime Prevention conducted a study with existing data about the

relation between death penalty and murder rate, concluding that:

"The study couldn't offer scientific support to the thesis that capital

punishment produces better results than life imprisonment and it's unlikely

that evidence of it will be soon available. Even data, in fact, doesn't

help thesis of deterrence."

Also, for the fifteen-year period in which California carried out

an execution every other month (1952 to 1967), murder rates increased 10%

annually, on average. Between 1967 and 1991, when there were no executions

in California, the murder rate increased 4.8% annually. The study also

found that, in the four months preceding a well-known killer's execution,

the average monthly number of homicides in California was 306. In the four

months following his highly publicized execution, an average of 333 persons

fell victim to homicides, an astonishing 9% increase. This shows that the

death of a fellow murderer had no effect on whether or not they would

commit the crime. It proves that the death penalty isn't an effective

deterrent.

Another reason why capitol punishment isn't a good idea is that we

can never really be sure who committed a murder, and so we must leave open

the possibility that we might later reverse a conviction and thus need to

apologize to the person who was wrongly convicted and imprisoned. In recent

Canadian history, we have a couple of such cases. There was many times in

my own childhood where I took the last cupcake, or spilled my milk. Not

all of these times was I held accountable for my misdeed. The younger