The death penalty; Can the death penalty be part of a civilized society?

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Arseny Knaifel        12JAS        English Essay

The death penalty; Can the death penalty be part of a civilized society?

A comment on the death penalty on the example of the USA.

The USA has a complex set of capital offenses, especially remarkable murder with aggravating circumstances.  Those set of laws claim that murder is wrong, so in turn, we, the people of the government, murder you.  These circumstances change from state to state, usually first-degree murder with conditions.  Some states like North Carolina or Missouri list general first-degree murder as a capital offense with any aggravating circumstances. However, the death penalty is not a sign for a civilized society, and the following aspects should demonstrate why I think that way.

The plain thought of imagining every execution that takes place can be satisfying if you are a victim party.  Or it could make you feel disgusted if you are a liberal.  The witnesses to the execution are usually members of the press and members of the family of the victim.  They see everything.  They see 20.000 volts of electricity being shot through a person’s body, they see a man bound to a chair in the gas chamber when the deadly gas is coming out from under his chair and goes into his lungs, and they sometimes see a man being shot to death by a firing squad.

There are reasons why the government continues to administer capital punishment.  Most supporters agree that it is an important prevention of violent crimes.  If criminals know the punishment is the most severe anyone can give, they might think twice about committing a violent crime.  This usually doesn’t work, because the average person spends twelve years on death row and only a fraction of death row inmates are executed due to the increasing amount of commutes to life sentences.   Another reason might be the fact that the murder rate hasn’t decreased while the execution rate has remained the same.  Others would argue that it serves as closure and fair punishment to those who think they can get away with a crime with a prison sentence.

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Why does the USA continue to employ the death penalty when fifty other developed democracies have abolished it?  Simple, the death penalty represents a deeply held US-American belief in violent social justice that sees the executioner as an agent of local control and safeguard of community values.  I hear a story that Thomas Jefferson once shot a man on the white house territory for treason.  For some reason, it didn’t surprise me at all that the chief executive would carry out an execution himself.  The reason was that I understood that it was the eighteenth century and that’s how it ...

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