Essay About Death Penalty And Common Crimes

Death Penalty in America
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The death penalty is the punishment used in 38 states, and many
other countries, as a way of disposing the people in society who are
mentally or emotionally disturbed, love their families very much, have a
bad temper, or just plain made a mistake. These reasons account for many
homicides that take place each year. Capitol Punishment is just not humane
and should not be legal.
The argument most often used to support the death penalty in
former-Soviet republics is the necessity of having a particularly
efficacious deterrent against murders and other common crimes. However,
none of the many studies about the matter have been able to show that death
penalty is more of a deterrent than other punishments. Its completely
wrong to think that most of those who commit serious crimes such as murders
consider the consequences of their actions. Murders are often committed
when the criminal is blinded with passion, when emotions prevail over
reason. They are sometimes committed under the influence of drugs or
alcohol, or in panic moments, when the culprit is discovered while he
steals, as I mentioned already. Some murderers have very serious
psychiatric problems or are mental patients. In none of these cases is it
possible that the fear to be sentenced to death could act as an effective
deterrent.
There is another heavy limit. One who plans a crime rationally can
choose to go on, although he knows the risk hes running, thinking that he
wont be discovered. Most of the criminologists assert that the best way to
discourage murderers isnt increasing the severity of punishment, but
increasing the possibility of discovering the crime and condemning the
culprit. This will take care of the truly deserving people, who know and
understand what they are doing.
Sometimes death penalty has opposite effects to the ones wanted.
Those who know they risk to be sentenced to death can be encouraged to kill
the witnesses of their crime or anyone who could be able to identify and
incriminate them. To prevent their own death, they would kill again, and
eventually get away with the preliminary murder.
Data about crime in abolitionist countries doesnt prove at all
that the abolishment of death penalty has provoked its rise. In 1988 the UN
Board for Crime Prevention conducted a study with existing data about the
relation between death penalty and murder rate, concluding that:
“The study couldnt offer scientific support to the thesis that capital
punishment produces better results than life imprisonment and its unlikely
that evidence of it will be soon available. Even data, in fact, doesnt
help thesis of deterrence.”
Also, for the fifteen-year period in which California carried out
an execution every other month (1952 to 1967), murder rates increased 10%
annually, on average. Between 1967 and 1991, when there were no executions
in California, the murder rate increased 4.8% annually. The study also
found that, in the four months preceding a well-known killers execution,
the average monthly number of homicides in California was 306. In the four
months following his highly publicized execution, an average of 333 persons
fell victim to homicides, an astonishing 9% increase. This shows that the
death of a fellow murderer had no effect on whether or not they would
commit the crime. It proves that the death penalty isnt an effective
deterrent.
Another reason why capitol punishment isnt a good idea is that we
can never really be sure who committed a murder, and so we must leave open
the possibility that we might later reverse a conviction and thus need to
apologize to the person who was wrongly convicted and imprisoned. In recent
Canadian history, we have a couple of such cases. There was many times in
my own childhood where I took the last cupcake, or spilled my milk. Not
all of these times was I held accountable for my misdeed. The younger