Is the death sentence a permissible practice?
In North America, capital punishment is usually reserved for cases of violence and murder. Its purpose is to make sure that the person who has committed the crime will never be able to do so in the future. If not a preventative measure, capital punishment is a way to defuse a growing outrage in society—a political killing to appease people’s cry for justice of particularly unjust acts.
But does that make it permissible?
If we first hold that capital punishment is permissible, then we must explore when it is permissible. It could be argued for cases of premeditated killing, serial murder, slave trading, and so on. In most of these cases, the common trends are people willingly putting themselves above the lives of others for personal gain or desire; in short, endangering others. An individual’s selfishness alienates them from social norms, and their actions impose inequity on other’s rights to life. The death sentence, then, is a result of someone self-alienating from a social group by actively imposing on the rights of others and endangering lives. In short, this is an “eye for an eye” mentality; those who kill, in return, be killed. This is the basic reasoning behind why someone would accept capital punishment – it seems intuitive.
Though intuitive, capital punishment really has little else going for it other than short-term gratification. Even the gratification of justice is only a temporary pleasure that eventually fades. Criminals should still be persecuted, but killing them doesn’t change anything. In almost every way of looking at capital punishment, there are no long-term sustainable benefits. I will attempt to now argue that capital punishment is not a permissible or even a logical punishment.
There are many rationalizations for trying to justify the death sentence. One of the more popular justifications involves having a severe penalty for people so it gives them fewer incentives to commit crime. This might be able to stop petty crime from occurring, because it makes the profit much worse than the punishment. If someone is already willing to take a life, however, there is really no punishment that will scare them out of doing so. The kinds of crime that proponents of the death sentence prevent are unaffected. To someone committing a crime that would warrant the death penalty, death or life in prison is the effectively same. Negative reinforcements keeps common people scared, but it doesn’t actually solve the problem of major offenders.
This further might make people more willing to go to drastic measures to avoid the death penalty. For example, if it would be true that someone could avoid the death penalty by admitting to a crime, then the majority of guilty people would admit to the crime to avoid death and choose prison. However, there is always the chance of someone who is innocent, pleading innocence, and then being sentenced to death. Human error is always a factor in the justice system. Sentencing an innocent person to death leaves nothing to be done; sentencing an innocent person to life in prison is a mistake, but there is more room to fix that mistake. What if we take the death penalty as an abstract in its idealistic form, free from human error. Could it then be permissible?
No. There is nothing gained from execution.
When a person is found, without a doubt, guilty of crimes which could warrant the death penalty, then it is likely that they have taken something away from society. In death, they have no way of giving back to society. This, in the abstract, leaves society with a deficit which the dead criminal can never replenish. If the person was instead imprisoned, they would at least have the chance to give back to society. Realistically, even if they are not willing to give back to the community, there is always something that could be learned from them. For example, criminals could be studied by psychologists to better understand the mind of someone who has committed a crime. This information, though limited, is better to have than to not have at all. Killing people removes all positive and negative possibilities.
Though this does not scratch the surface of the argument, capital punishment seems unlikely as a logical option. It is usually a product of a knee-jerk reaction to serious offences. Giving people a chance to be able to atone for their crimes seems more worthwhile than having a guaranteed loss in their death.