Introduction
Listen closely to the debate about capital punishment in the United States. You will discover a disagreement about where the practice is located in a map of American values and practices. In the last century, the validity of capital punishment has become a debatable issue. Supporters of capital punishment believe that it should be used as prevention from future crimes. However, opponents of the capital punishment suggest that it should be abolished for many reasons.
Proponents of execution favor a specific and discrete conception of capital punishment: to them, it is a question of the appropriate sanction to be imposed on the most serious form of murder, a matter of principal importance to one part of the administration of criminal justice. By contrast, the abolitionists see the impact of executions as a statement of pervasive importance about the relationship between the government and the individual. (James, 33-40)
Abolitionists in the United States view capital punishment as a fundamental political issue; proponents usually assert that the question is neither fundamental nor political.
If the availability of death as a criminal punishment were a garden-variety choice of punishment option, state and local power over them would be consistent with an important American tradition. If, on the other hand, one regards capital punishment as a fundamental moral and political question, the national government and constitutional values are the appropriate vehicles for decisions. (Jan, 110-12)
The Flaws in Implementation of Capital Punishment
The proper way of characterizing the capital punishment may be an important question, but it is not a difficult one. Our history, the recent history of other developed nations, and even the importance that the proponents of the penalty attach to it are powerful evidence that the capital punishment is an issue of transcendent importance, one that is principally moral and political. (Zimring, 78-82)
There are certain reservations from some corners of public discussions as regards to the unreliable evidences that caused capital punishment but consequently proved false. It is hard to believe how prosecutors can admit evidence from unreliable sources. In some cases, witnesses have later recanted or disavowed their testimonies claiming that they had only made their statements under pressure or coercion from prosecution and law enforcement. These false testimonies proved to be the condemning evidence in many cases. Lastly, most of the people charged in capital cases cannot afford defense attorneys. The appointed defense counsels in several cases have exhibited incompetence. Some of them did not even look for or missed important evidence that proved the innocence of their clients.
Discussion and Analysis
Law enforcement and prosecutors also add to the error rate in capital convictions. Eager to solve and close homicide cases, police and prosecution have demonstrated unethical actions by suppressing evidence or wrongly influencing witnesses. For eighteen years, Dennis Williams, along with three other black men, lived on death row. The four men were convicted in 1978 of the kidnapping and murder of a white couple in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.
After receiving an anonymous tip, police arrested them even though they had no physical evidence linking the men to the crime. Mr. Williams maintained his innocence but was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. In 1987, he was granted a retrial but was again sentenced to death. He had lost all faith in the legal system at that point. However, after eighteen years on death row in a cell just twenty-five feet away from the electric chair, Williams was found innocent and released. Newly uncovered evidence proving his innocence was not found by law enforcement or prosecutors. (Hugo, 89-93) It was discovered by the investigative work of journalism students from Northwestern University.
The case of Dennis Williams is a clear example of the unethical practices of law enforcement and prosecutors. Instead of serving and protecting a fellow citizen, they willfully chose to let an innocent man sit on death row for eighteen years. Law enforcement should represent justice in this country. In Mr. Williams’ case, the police chose to support their racial biases above upholding justice.
Mr. Spaziano, co-founder of the Orlando chapter of the notorious Outlaws Motorcycle Brotherhood spent twenty years on death row and came within weeks of execution for crimes he did not commit. “Of the 70 or so condemned prisoners I have been involved with for the past 12 years, Mr. Spaziano was my only innocent client” (Banner, 110-14). Mr. Spaziano was charged with the brutal murder of a young woman and also the unrelated rape and mutilation of another.
Mr. Spaziano was convicted by a jury, which recommended a life prison sentence. Later a post-conviction investigation showed that the jury had serious doubts about his guilt and therefore withheld a death sentence. However, the judge in the case overrode their decision and sentenced him to die in the electric chair. His death warrant was signed in May of 1995, scheduling and execution for 7:00 AM on June 27, 1995. Michael Mello still maintained his client’s innocence and took his story to the Miami Herald, which ran the editorial just nineteen days before the scheduled execution.
Legislative and Criminal Justice System Condition
Another area in which competent defense attorneys are needed is during the post-conviction stage. Many death row inmates are finding it more and more difficult to get lawyers to help in the appeals process. States provide poor defendants with attorneys for the initial appeals, but prisoners must obtain their own counsel after that. These inmates can only hope to find attorneys who are willing to handle appeals on a pro bono, or free, basis.
Arguments for the continued use of the capital punishment cannot be ignored. Supporters of capital punishment often have justifiable reasons for their beliefs. One argument is that the capital punishment is a strong deterrent against violent crimes, murder, or terrorism. Supporters believe that life in prison is too risky a sentence. They say that it does not work in the case of habitual offenders, will not deter others from crime, and leaves too much possibility of escape. They believe that imposing the ultimate penalty has reduced the crime and murder rate.
The Proponent’s Contradiction
That European perspective may be correct. One of the most significant problems encountered by those who would classify the capital punishment as an operational criminal justice issue is the way that proponents of the penalty put substantial emphasis on the issue despite its very limited practical effect. Executions in the twentieth century have never reached a level that is even 1 percent of our current rates of criminal homicide, and executions have averaged less than one-fifth of 1 percent of homicides in the 1990s.
This rarely used sanction is a hot button issue for political actors, at least as important as any other issue in crime and justice in any state where change in policy is a real possibility. (Rein, 44-48) There is also a substantive problem that makes proponents of execution reluctant to discuss fundamental values as first and foremost. This reluctance may be fueled by an intuition that discussing the state’s claim to execute as a general instrument of state policy is inconsistent with American skepticism about government and high regard for the value of the individual. If so, the best way to argue for capital punishment is to avoid a context of fundamental value and to focus instead on the operational necessity of executions. (Grant, 25-29)
Instead of using the capital punishment to express society’s rage at wanton murder, we would be better off forcing remorseless and callous criminals to confront their depravity and make them realize how much pain they cause to others. It would be even more useful to turn our energies away from revenge on the perpetrators of crime and concentrate them instead on community support for the victims, who are often neglected as the criminal justice system focuses on retribution. We cannot be a civilized society while we indulge in hatred and consign forgiveness to the sidelines. Anyone can be a knee-jerk reactionary and demand blood; it takes enormous courage to forgive the depraved who have caused us such enormous pain and sorrow. (Culver, 287-92)
Conclusion
Founded on the principle of expiation–so contrary to the law of Christian charity and respect for life–an attempt was made to sublimate the significance of the death penalty and give it a moral content. This attitude was both a compromise with paganism and a spiritual shield against it. There are some laws so exalted, some goods so sacred, that he who attacks them can only expiate the offense by paying the supreme penalty –providing his sacrifice is accompanied by repentance on the part of the sinner and pardon on the part of God’s representatives.
“The wages of sin is death.” Thus, in early Christian thought, expiatory death, leading to the redemption of the repentant sinner, would yet win for him eternal life. Both the Christian Fathers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, considered the death penalty legitimate and spiritually justified when the evil they feared, in leaving the condemned man alive, seemed greater than his chances of reform.
The United States is supposed to be a country that protects its’ citizen’s rights, however, it is one of the very few countries where the capital punishment still exists, which is contradicting. The capital punishment should be abolished in the United States for a number of reasons, including discrimination, human error, promotion of violence, costliness, and “cruel and unusual” punishment, which is unconstitutional.
The society needs to speak out against the capital punishment because it is inhumane and cruel. Society may sometimes feel that the capital punishment is necessary because it is the only way to get justice, but to actually need an execution to solve our problems is a cruel idea. If the people allow themselves to be motivated by vengeance and hate the society will never survive, therefore, the capital punishment should be abolished.
The idea that capital punishment deters murder rests on a straightforward assumption: fear influences people; most people fear death; therefore, the threat of a judicial sentence of death will influence people to refrain from murder. Unfortunately, the fear of death does not govern people to the degree this assumes. If it did, neither wars nor extreme sports would happen, people would obey speed limits and wear safety belts, and the tobacco industry wouldn’t exist.
If you want to use the instinct for self-preservation, as a reason capital punishment must work, you have to discount most of history, as well as most contemporary human behavior. Nor does the deterrence theory account for the most striking homicide statistic: of all forms of homicide, the one that takes place most often, in fact more often than all the others combined, always entails the death of the perpetrator: suicide. People kill themselves more often than they kill anyone else. This fact disproves the argument.
One of the most compelling arguments against capital punishment involves the obvious risk of executing an innocent person, and a number of related risks. Perhaps the most serious concern for Americans, given the way the American system uses capital punishment, involves the prospect of an innocent person being forced into a plea bargain by the threat of a capital prosecution. But no jurisdiction considering the enactment of capital statutes, or considering enforcing a death sentence, can avoid the possibility of an innocent person wrongly accused, convicted, or executed. Experience has shown this fear has considerable justification. Indeed, the laws of probability suggest that, given an indefinite series of trials, however unlikely in any one trial, eventually grows into a certainty.
Capital punishment should protect the innocent and serve justice. However, experience raises serious questions about whether it does either of these things. While some evidence suggests it may decrease the number of murders, we have plenty of other evidence that it does exactly the opposite, and plenty that it does no good at all. The danger of executing innocent people should make anyone think twice about speeding up or streamlining the process; indeed, a disturbing number of the innocent people saved from death row spent more than four years there, so calls to restrict the appeals process so as to execute convicts in four years or less makes it quite conceivable that in many cases, exoneration may come too late.
Works Cited
Banner, Stuart (2002) The Capital punishment: An American History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 110-14.
Capital punishment Information Center. “History of capital punishment, Part 2” History of capital punishment. 2005. Web.
Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1998.
Culver, John H. (1999) “Capital Punishment Politics and Policies in the States, 1977-1997,” 32 Crime, Law & Social Change 287- 292.
Grant, Robert. “Capital Punishment and Violence.” Humanist 2004: 25-29. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO HOST Research Databases. Otonas and Raimonda Balciunai Library. Web.
Hugo Adam Bedau. The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 89-93.
James R. Acker, Robert M. Bohm, and Charles S. Lanier, eds. America’s Experiment With Capital Punishment: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of the Ultimate Penal Sanction. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1998. 33-40.
Jan Arriens, ed. Welcome to Hell: Letters and Writings from Death Row. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997. 110-12.
Rein, Ling Mei. Capital Punishment Cruel and Unusual? Michigan: Gale Group, Inc. 2002.U.S. Department of Justice · Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment Statistics. 44-48.
Zimring, F. (2003). The contradictions of American capital punishment. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 78-82.