Pro Speech- Capital Punishment

by peeta (student)

'The right to life means that capital punishment is always wrong.' Discuss this claim.

I am going to argue against this statement as guilty people deserve to be punished in proportion to the severity of their crime. Capital punishment is a morally dubious concept as the anticipatory suffering of the criminal, who may be kept on death row for many years, makes the punishment more severe than just depriving the criminal of life. I will also discuss the history of the death penalty.

The first established death penalty laws date as far back as the Eighteenth Century B.C. in the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes. Britain influenced America's use of the death penalty more than any other country. When European settlers came to the new world, they brought the practice of capital punishment. The first recorded execution in the new colonies was that of Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608.

Today, the death penalty continues to be an issue of controversy, but the number of people that are for the death penalty continues to grow. An example of this is the law that passed in 1994. As part of an omnibus crime bill, the federal death penalty was expanded to some 60 different offenses. Among the federal crimes for which people in any state or territory of the U.S. can receive a death sentence are murder of certain government officials, kidnapping resulting in death, murder for hire, fatal drive-by shootings, sexual abuse crimes resulting in death, carjacking resulting in death, ...

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Now, I will discuss some of the grounds for justifying the death penalty. First of all, one of the most convincing reasons why the death penalty should be used is because it lowers crime rates. According to Steven Goldberg the chairman of the sociology department at City College in New York, the best evidence that the death penalty has a unique deterrent in crime is not based on statistics but is rather based on common sense and experience. Furthermore, Professor Isaac Ehrilich said that each additional execution prevents about seven or eight people from committing murder.

Another good reason why the death penalty should be used in our society is to protect our loved ones against horrible deaths by murder. As Edward I Koch explains, human life deserves special protection, and one of the best ways to ensure that protection is to assure that convicted murderers do not kill again, and only the death penalty can accomplish this end.

Finally, I will dispute some of the popular arguments against the death penalty. Opponents of the death penalty argue that in many cases innocent people accused of false crimes are sentenced with the death penalty and are not found to be truly innocent until after the sentence is carried out. However, modern technology such as DNA testing is being used to prevent this from happening.

Teacher Reviews

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Dennis Salter

13th of Feb 2013

This is very poorly argued. No evidence is put forward. just the unjustified views of 2 people. There is little evidence of research and the writer has done nothing to examine the views of the people against capital punishment.

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