Fully Just?

Fully Just?

The death penalty debate is an extremely controversial issue affecting the world today. In today’s society, people argue whether the death penalty is an acceptable form of justice. In America, the pros and cons of the death penalty are an ongoing debate. Countless questions arise whenever someone mentions the death penalty. Is Capital Punishment just? The death penalty is just. As a citizen of the United States, I am interested in this issue because I live under the statutes of the American justice system. Someone who disagrees with the death penalty claims that it is wrong to promote murder, yet he or she promotes murder by opposing an equal punishment for those who commit the crime. Not executing criminals who commit horrific crimes is preserving a life that has devalued all life.

People have been sentenced to death for various forms of wrongdoing all throughout history. One can trace back execution all the way to the crucifixion of Jesus. Stoning, drowning, burning at the stake, impaling, and beheading are other forms of punishment that people used hundreds of years ago. These previous methods are found cruel and unusual and evolve to what we refer to today as modern capital punishment. Capital Punishment today is the legal infliction of death as a penalty for violating criminal law and is justly so. Since 1976, capital punishment is accomplished through various means; lethal injection (primarily), electrocution, and gas chamber are the most prominent (Death Penalty Information Center). These new methods are more efficient and less inhumane for the party receiving the sentence of death. Thirty-eight states across the country currently take part in capital punishment; thirty-seven of which use lethal injection as the primary means. The law executes both men and woman for various crimes, but for the most part the severity of the punishment increases with the severity of the crime (Death Penalty Information Center). The crime most punished with the death penalty is murder, and rightfully so. Society is better off without people who commit inhumane crimes.

Opponents of the death penalty commonly portray the death penalty as a barbaric "eye for an eye" approach to criminal justice. Although most parts of the world do not take this philosophy literally, our culture still follows the spirit of this law. In America, two out of every three people support the death penalty, about sixty-six percent (Death Penalty Information Center). When a crime is committed, an important function of our criminal justice system is to administer a fair and just punishment for the crime underway. Americans seem to agree with or oppose the death penalty on a case-by-case standard. When it comes to murder cases, the majority of Americans believe that death adequately brings justice. In the case of Timothy McVeigh who was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing that killed one hundred sixty eight people, approximately eighty percent of Americans favored the death penalty (Carroll 1). After a murder takes place, the criminal should pay a penalty that is roughly equal to the loss brought about by the crime. Most cases of murder devalue life so grotesquely that the only punishment that directly compensates for this tremendous loss is the penalty of execution to the guilty party as a form of retribution for the lives taken.

Imagine hearing the news that your sister or loved one was violently murdered. There is no easy way to bring justice about to a family for such a loss. The death penalty brings about a sense of fairness and a form of justice to the family and friends of the dead. The death penalty is the only punishment for violent criminals and murderers if justice is to be administered. Violent crimes and murders are the cruelest, most inhumane crimes that exist and they violate the victim’s right to life, which are why the severest punishment is necessary to correspond to this lack of remorse. In one case where jurors administered the death penalty, the murderer raped, beat, and then stoned a seven-year-old girl to death. This man, Fred Mundt Jr., brutally raped Brittany Hendrickson, a young girl who looked to him as a father figure. After sexually abusing this seven-year-old girl, he then carried her bleeding body to a well and threw her in to drown. The young girl was not yet dead though, so he proceeded to cast stones at her, knocking her unconscious and drowning her