PERSUASIVE ESSAY: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Persuasive Essay: Capital Punishment



Persuasive Essay: Capital Punishment

Introduction

Capital Punishment is defined as the legal infliction of the death penalty. The death penalty is corporal punishment in its most severe form and is used instead of life long imprisonment. Putting people to death that have committed extremely terrible crimes is a practice of ancient condition, but it has become a very controversial issue in todays society. Capital punishment has been used for centuries, even the Bible contains over thirty stories or incidents about a person put to death for a crime they committed. Public executions stopped after 1936. The death penalty has been inflicted in many different ways. Today in the United States, there are five ways that the death penalty is done. These criminals are put to death by a lethal injection, electrocution, lynching, a firing squad, or the gas chamber. These punishments are much less severe than the forms of execution in the past. In the past, people were executed by crucifixion, boiling in oil, drawing and quartering, impalement, beheading, burning alive, crushing, tearing, stoning, and even drowning. The methods used today compared to those of history are not meant for torture but instead for punishment for heinous crimes and to rid the earth of these dangerous people. The majority of America supports the death penalty.

Discussion

There are many reasons why capital punishment is a good thing, and should be enforced and used more. First off, capital punishment is a good thing because it deters crime. For example, in the 1960s while the number of executions was decreasing, the homicide rate was increasing. As execution started to increase, statistics show that the homicide rate slowly decreased or stayed the same, but it did not increase. Fear of death deters people from committing crime. The death penalty puts forth a positive moral influence by putting disgrace on crimes such as manslaughter causing attitudes of horror and disgust to such acts. (Schabas 1997)

If people are thinking of committing murder and are aware that they will be released because of early parole, then it will not effectively stop any future crime from happening. Most murderers would think again about committing murder if they knew that their own life was at stake. Executions increase public safety by completely ending the chance that the murderer would ever return to the streets to murder again. It prevents a reoccurrence of violence, and also discourages an action from occurring. Studies show that increasing the number of death sentences would prevent at least 105 murders. Expelling capital punishment on the grounds that it does not deter crime, than we must also eliminate all prisons because they are not a more effective deterrent of crime. In the state of New York, the death penalty is now in effect and there are many death penalty cases in progress, and the murder rate continues to drop faster than ever. In Africa, because of the high percentage of AIDS, rapists are less likely to attack a grown woman because ...