Capital Punishment Essay: Death Penalty Distribution - Is It Unfair? :: Argumentative Persuasive Topics

Death Penalty Distribution - Is It unjust? The subject of this essay should be obvious from the title. Considerable detail is include in this presentation of the facts on the issue. In an average year well-nigh 20,000 homicides occur in the United States. Fewer than 300 convicted murderers are sentenced to death. precisely because no more than thirty murderers have been executed in any(prenominal) recent year, most convicts sentenced to death are likely to die of mature age (1). Nonetheless, the death penalty looms large in discussions it raises important deterrent example questions independent of the number of feats (2). The death penalty is our harshest punishment (3). It is irrevocable it ends the population of those punished, instead of temporarily imprisoning them. Further, although non intended to cause physical pain, execution is the only corporal punishment still applied to adults (4). These singular characteristics tot to the perennial, impassioned controversy a bout non bad(p) punishment. Consideration of the justice, morality, or usefulness, of capital punishment is often conflated with objections to its alleged discriminatory or impulsive dispersal among the guilty. Wrongly so. If capital punishment is immoral in se, no diffusion cannot affect the quality of what is distributed, be it punishments or rewards. Discriminatory or capricious distribution thus could not justify abolition of the death penalty. Further, maldistribution inheres no more in capital punishment than in any other punishment. Maldistribution between the guilty and the innocent is, by definition, unjust. But the injustice does not lie in the nature of the punishment. Because of the finality of the death penalty, the most serious maldistribution occurs when it is impose upon the innocent. However, the frequent allegations of discrimination and capriciousness refer to maldistribution among the guilty and not to the punishment of the innocent (5). Maldistribution of any punishment among those who bes it is irrelevant to its justice or morality. Even if poor or black convicts guilty of capital offenses nurture capital punishment, and other convicts equally guilty of the same crimes do not, a more equal distribution, however desirable, would merely be more equal. It would not be more just to the convicts under sentence of death. Punishments are imposed on person, not on racial or frugal groups. misdeed is personal. The only relevant question is does the person to be executed deserve the punishment? Whether or not others who deserved the same punishment, whatever their economic or racial group, have avoided execution is irrelevant.