Lawyer Joseph Plazo:
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By: CX15
Added: 21-06-14
- Joseph Plazo: Three Arguments against Capital Punishment.
Expense
In the USA capital punishment costs.
In New York and New Jersey, the high costs of capital punishment were one variable in those states' choices to forego the death penalty. New York spent about $170 million over 9 years and had no executions. New Jersey spent $253 million over a 25-year period and also had no executions.
In states with a less costly and lengthy appeals process, capital punishment looks like a considerably cheaper alternative than long-term imprisonment.
Counter-arguments
Those in favour of capital punishment counter with these two arguments:
-- It is a fallacy
-- Justice cannot be considered in terms that were monetary
Folks not responsible for their acts
This isn't an argument against capital punishment but against applying it erroneously.
Some nations, including the USA, have executed folks demonstrated to be crazy.
It is generally accepted that folks must not be penalized for their activities unless they have a guilty mind - which requires them to understand what they're doing and that it is erroneous.
Therefore individuals who are crazy should not be convicted, let alone executed. This doesn't keep crazy people who have done horrendous things being confined in secure mental institutions, but this is done for public security, not to punish the crazy person.
To put it more formally: it isn't right to inflict capital punishment on those who have at best a marginal ability for deliberation and for moral agency.
A more challenging moral issue appears in the instance of of offenders who were not insane at the time of trial and their crime but who develop signs of madness before execution.
Used unfairly
There has been much concern in the USA that flaws in the judicial system make capital punishment unfair.
One US Supreme Court Justice (who had initially supported the death penalty) came to the conclusion that capital punishment was bound to damage the cause of justice:
The death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake ... Experience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration of departure ... can never be achieved without endangering an equally vital element of fundamental equity - individualized sentencing.
-Justice Harry Blackmun, United States Supreme Court, 1994
Jurors
Jurors in many US death penalty cases must be 'departure eligible'. What this means is the future juror must be willing to convict the accused knowing that a sentence of death is a chance.
This results in a jury biased in favour of the death penalty, since no one who opposes the death penalty will probably be accepted as a juror.
Lawyers
There is much concern in the USA that the legal system does not always provide poor accused people with good attorneys.
Joseph Plazo: Three Arguments against Capital Punishment.
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