Capital Punishment Essay: Incidental Issues :: Argumentative Persuasive Topics

Incidental Issues and Capital penalization This essay gives consideration to some of the incidental issues in the stopping point penalty debate cost, relative suffering, brutalization, and others. Many nondecisive issues are associated with capital punishment. Some think that the monetary cost of appealing a capital sentence is immoderate (1). Yet most comparisons of the cost of manners imprisonment with the cost of life imprisonment with the cost of execution, apart from their dubious relevance, are flawed at least by the implied assumption that life prisoners will generate no judicial cost during their imprisonment. At any rate, the actual monetary costs are trumped by the importance of doing justice. Others insist that a person sentenced to death suffers more than his dupe suffered, and that this (excess) suffering is undue according to the lex talionis (rule of retaliation) (2). We cannot know whether the receiver on death row suffers more than his dupe suffered however , unlike the carrying into actioner, the victim deserved none of the suffering inflicted. Further, the limitations of the lex talionis were meant to restrain private vengeance, not the affectionate retribution that has taken its place. Punishment-- regardless of the motivation-- is not intended to revenge, offset, or castigate for the victims suffering, or to measured by it. Punishment is to vindicate the law and the affectionate order undermined by the hatred. This is why a kidnappers penal working class is not limited to the period for which he imprisoned his victim nor is a burglars confinement meant merely to offset the suffering or the harm he caused his victim nor is it meant only to offset the advantage he gained (3). Another argument hear at least since Beccaria (4) is that, by killing a murderer, we encourage, endorse, or legitimate nefarious killing. Yet, although all punishments are meant to be unpleasant, it is seldom argued that they legitimize the unlawful im position of identical unpleasantness. Imprisonment is not thought to legitimize nobble neither are fines thought to legitimize robbery. The difference between murder and execution, or between kidnapping and imprisonment, is that the first is unlawful and undeserved, the second a lawful and deserved punishment for an unlawful act. The physical similarities of the punishment to the crime are irrelevant. The relevant difference is not physical, but social (5). We stake punishments in order to deter crime. We impose them not only to get along the threats credible but also as retribution (justice) for the crimes that were not deterred.