Capital punishment. The big debate on who gets to decide whether someone lives or dies? Pacifist would say that it’s unethical and inhumane and that it is highly ironic that you’re killing those who kill, just to get the point across not to kill. Realist, like me, however, would retort back that by not ridding ourselves of these kind of people, it would feel as if we were just letting them get away with what they’ve done, without them knowing that there are serious consequences to your actions.
The actions of certain criminals is the main reason why we need the death penalty. Who knows what could happen if we didn’t. For example, even though that is a very slim chance that a prisoner could escape from a high security prison that should be placed
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Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life… Time and time again we have witnessed the specter of mistakenly convicted people being put to death in the name of American criminal justice.
However, it is not the intention of those who support capital punishment to kill those who are innocent. Even though it does not happen often, it still happens, but anything that has to do with humans there will be human errors that occur. As Austin Sarat says
Many of those who fervently support capital punishment nonetheless worry about the risk of executing the innocent.
Also on Gale Student Resources in Context, 2014 also commented on the innocent affect by the death penalty said
…that the death penalty is an effective deterrent against those who would consider committing such a crime as murder, and that it is justifiable punishment for the taking of another innocent person’s life. They cite national and local crime statistics that show murder rates decline when the death penalty is enforced, and that murder rates rise substantially when a state’s death penalty has been