To Kill or Not to Kill: Why Capital Punishment is Wrong

     Throughout history, people have passionately debated effective punishment for everyone from toddlers to hardened criminals. Because capital punishment involves ending someone’s life, the debate and controversy in that area is even stronger. On one side, killing is fundamentally wrong from a moral standpoint. On the other side of the argument, capital punishment is necessary to carry out retributivism and people forfeit their right to live when they perform a heinous crime. For centuries, governments have carried out executions all over the world, ranging from hanging and electrocution to firing squads and lethal injections. For moral, economic, and political reasons, the practice of capital punishment is cruel, barbaric, and unnecessary, and therefore should be banned.

     Some proponents of capital punishment claim that it is a deterrent to crime, but no clear indication exists that proves it actually prevents crime. One reason capital punishment may not prevent crimes because criminal acts are driven by emotion, not logic or reason. Many crimes are impulsive, and even a criminal that plans his crimes generally does not rationally weigh the benefit versus the possible cost of his actions. Additionally, many criminals are unaware of their states’ current ruling regarding capital punishment, so it is unlikely that they would factor in the possibility of execution. Statistically, when comparing states that are geographically and demographically similar, one with a death penalty and one without, and if capital punishment affects crime rate, it causes more crime, not less. For example, Illinois averaged 9.6 murders annually per 100,000 people from 1977 to 1993 when it had the death penalty, while Iowa averaged 2.1 over the same years without a death penalty (Bedau 139). In some other states, the difference is not as pronounced and some even lean in the other direction with a death penalty state having less crime, but never is there a substantially lesser crime rate in a death penalty state. While other factors affect those numbers, statistics consistently do not show that the death penalty correlates to crime rate inversely.

     Governments throughout history have executed their citizens in grotesque, inhumane ways for committing extreme crimes in order to keep order and balance in society. However, capital punishment is barbaric, uncivilized, unnecessary, and morally wrong as a judicial practice. Commonly known as “an eye for an eye,” Hammurabi’s Code, which supports capital punishment, is outdated and incompatible with modern moral ideals. In today’s civilized society, this extreme type of retribution has no place. All humans are flawed, and allowing twelve flawed and possibly prejudiced humans, a jury, to decide the fate of another doesn’t make sense. If enough jurors are, for example, sexist against females, their vote may cause the death of a possibly innocent woman. Killing violates society’s basic moral code, so by sentencing a person to death the government is allowed to violate that same moral code. This is wrong. In modern times, our human rights have grown and evolved, yet the archaic practice of capital punishment remains.