Capital Punishment - Injustice of Society Looking out for the state of the publics satisfaction in the scheme of capital sentencing does not constitute serving justice. Todays system of capital punishment is frought with inequalities andinjustices. The commonly offered arguments for the death penalty are filled with holes. It was adeterrent. It removed killers. It was the ultimate punishment. It is biblical. It satisfied the publicsneed for retribution. It relieved the anguish of the victims family.(Grisham 120) Realistically,imposing the death penalty is expensive and time consuming. Retroactively, it has yet to beproven as a deterrent. Morally, it is a continuation of the cycle of violence and ...degrades allwho are involved in its enforcement, as well as its victim.(Stewart 1)Perhaps the most frequent argument for capital punishment is that of deterrence. The prevailingthought is that imposition of the death penalty will act to dissuade other criminals fromcommitting violent acts. Numerous studies have been created attempting to prove this belief;however, [a]ll the evidence taken together makes it hard to be confident that capital punishmentdeters more than long prison terms do.(Cavanagh 4) Going ever farther, Bryan Stevenson, theexecutive director of the Montgomery based Equal Justice Initiative, has stated that people areincreasingly realizing that the more we resort to killing as a legitimate response to our frustrationand anger with violence, the more violent our society becomesWe could execute all threethousand people on death row, and most people would not feel any safer tomorrow.(Frame 51)In addition, with the growing humanitarianism of modern society, the number of inmates actuallyput to death is substantially lower than 50 years ago. This decline creates a situation in which thedeath penalty ceases to be a deterrent when the populace begins to think that one can get awaywith a crime and go unpunished. Also, the less that t...
