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Example research essay topic: Capital Punishment Bad Policy - 1,252 words

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... There is no clear empirical support that says there is a lot of racial discrimination in the sentencing of those arrested and convicted for murder. Van den Haag does point out the unequal distribution of the death penalty when it comes to the race of the victim, however he says that this favors Blacks because those accused of a Black murder (which are usually Black) are more likely not to be put to death than are person who kills a white. These arguments seem to be very solid and to me are more convincing then the argument about discrimination made in the previous article by Von Drehl.

Although, I do not agree that the justice system is as color blind as van den Haag makes it out to be. The next part of the article goes into miscarriages of justice, which is about the execution of innocent people. The author claims that this is not a problem and a few executions do not outweigh the moral benefits of capital punishment. I think this is one of his weaker arguments.

To me if one innocent person is executed while twenty guilty are executed it is still a great loss and injustice. Killing someone is irreversible. If we execute an person and later find that the person was in fact innocent, there is no way of bringing that person back. If we didn't have the death penalty and a person accused of a murder is later found to be innocent, we can then release them from jail and compensate them for the lost years.

Also when a person is dead they can no longer make appeals. Keeping an innocent person alive and in jail would give them more time to prove their innocence. Next comes the deterrence argument. Oh how I love to hear pro-death people talk about deterrence. It is pretty widely known know that capital punishment does not deter people from murdering.

Most proponents of the death penalty would say that this is because not many executions take place and if they do its years after commit the act. They would say that we have to taken away some due process rights of the accused. The author of this article doesn't take this position, as I would have expected him to. Instead he basically says he doesn't care that the death penalty doesn't deter. Which he explains very well.

However, he then goes on to say that the death penalty does deter people from murdering. Yeah, I don't get it either. I guess he is saying that the strong evidence that suggests capital punishment doesn't deter is flawed in some way. I don't believe he backs this up very well though. The fact of the matter capital punishment does not deter people from killing. No study, which I have ever heard of, has found any conclusive evidence to suggest that it does.

In the one article that I evaluated Akers and Radelet do a study on this subject. They interviewed countless expert criminologist about this issue. They found that overwhelmingly criminologists said that there is weak support or no support at all for the deterrence effect. Only 4. 5 % of the criminologists interviewed said there was moderate support for the deterrence argument; not one criminologist said there was strong support for the deterrence argument.

When proponents of capital punishment argue for deterrence they almost always weaken their argument. Cost, relative suffering, and brutalization are the next topics that van den Haag talks about next. His argument about cost seems solid and accurate and is not elaborated on that much. Next the issue of suffering. Van den Haag notes that suffering of the death row inmate can not be measured against the suffering of his victim because unlike the inmate, the victim did not deserve his or her fate. I have trouble with this argument because when a person is put to death they no longer suffer.

So if we are trying to make a person suffer for their crime wouldn't it make sense to keep the prison alive and conscious of his punishment? By killing someone we are rescuing them from suffering they will have to endure if they had to stay in jail for life. People in jail suffer because of their lack of freedom, as they should. I don't want to make this sound like I am not for improving prison conditions and reducing prisoner abuse, because I am. But here I am talking about suffering with regards to a lack of freedom, not abuse. The brutalization argument I will not go into deeply because I am pretty ignorant of the subject.

Basically van den Haag says that killing a murder does not legitimize murder just as jailing doesn't legitimize kidnapping and fines don't legitimize robbery. I really don't agree with that in that kidnapping and robbery usually aren't used as a means of revenge, murder often is. If the state kills people to punish murders it may send the message that killing is acceptable under certain circumstances. Another argument van den Haag makes is that capital punishment affirms the murder's humanity by affirming his rationality and his responsibility for his actions. Therefore we should execute them in order to give them dignity. To me this is a very odd argument.

This argument could be made for any form of punishment. Basically this is not a good argument for capital punishment; it is a good argument for punishment in general. No one is really arguing that we shouldn't punish murders, its just that we shouldn't kill them. Overall I think that van den Haag does make a better argument then Von Drehl does, however I think most of the arguments made on both sides are weak. Van den Haag does a better job in pointing out the other side of the argument, and he deals with those arguments very nicely. He is short and to the point and probably uses some of the best arguments for capital punishment.

He fails, however, to convince me that capital punishment is a good policy. After evaluating these two articles it is clear that this issue of capital punishment is a very complex one. I can not agree with either of the major arguments made by the two authors. The only thing I agree with is Von Drehl's position that capital punishment is a bad policy, however I think he made some bad choices about what arguments to make. He could have made stronger arguments about deterrence, execution of the innocent and moral issues.

Van den Haag's is effective in demonstrating a tough argument in favor of capital punishment. We are the last industrialized democratic country who still practices capital punishment. Why is this? Most people in this country seem to favor capital punishment, however most abandon this position when presented with harsh alternatives. There is a lack of strong evidence to suggest that capital punishment reduces the murder rate.

I have seen stronger evidence (however still relatively weak) to suggest just the opposite, in that it increases the murder rate. Illinois has suspended all executions because many death row inmates have been proven innocent. Who knows how many innocent people we have killed? The way I see it capital punishment is not reducing the amount of innocent people killed it is increasing it. It does nothing to deter people from killing and too many times kills wrongly accused people.

We need to abandon this stupid policy immediately. Stop the killing. Bibliography:


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