Immanuel Kant's Arguments Against Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment When turning on the television, radio, or simply opening the newspaper, one is overwhelmed with news broadcast of arrests, murders, shootings, and other misfortunes. It is a rare occasion to go throughout a day in this world and not hear of these things. So what should be done about this crime rate? Not only is committing a crime, an inappropriate thing to do, but today, it is signing your life over to the government. This is a danger one is taking when he decides to pull a trigger. But how often do these ideas sneak into the public's mind when it hears of our government taking away someone's living rights? There are many issues that address this question of capital punishment such as religion, the effect on society,

Those who support the death penalty believe, or claim to believe, that capital punishment is morally and honorably acceptable. The gist of their evidence comes from the Old Testament which actually recommends the use of capital punishment for a number of crimes. Others also quote the Sixth Commandment which, in the King James Version reads, "Thou shalt not kill." However, these literal understandings of certain passages from the Bible which are often quoted out of context corrupt the sympathetic attitude of Christianity (The Holy Bible: King James Version). In the early days of capital punishment, executions, were painful, humiliating, and public, may create a sense of horror that would prevent others from being tempted to commit similar crimes. In our day death is usually administered in private by relatively painless means, such as an injection to the arm of drugs, and to that extent it may be less effective as a

The “death penalty is a lethal lottery: just one out of every one hundred people arrested for murder is actually executed”. Only thirty-one out of more than fifteen thousand recorded executions in the United States have been of white suspects convicted of killing black victims, while black suspects convicted of raping white women were commonly sentenced to death (Amnesty International). Another response to the fact that innocent people have been executed is, that the small number of innocents executed outweighs the number of lives that will be saved since the possibility of being executed will discourage others from committing murder, and also lives will be saved since that murderer can-not kill again. Career criminals and those that plan a crime do not expect to get caught, thus making the consequences an invalid issue. In response to the fact that an executed murderer will never kill again, society must ask itself whether it is honorably and properly acceptable to risk killing an innocent person when an alternative such as life imprisonment without possibility of parole