Capital Punishment: Does The End Justify The Means?

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welfare of its
citizens. Murderers threaten this safety and welfare. Only by putting murderers
to death can society ensure that convicted killers do not kill again.
Second, those favoring capital punishment contend that society should
support those practices that will bring about the greatest balance of good over
evil, and capital punishment is one such practice. Capital punishment benefits
society because it may deter violent crime. While it is difficult to produce
direct evidence to support this claim since, by definition, those who are
deterred by the death penalty do not commit murders, common sense tells us that
they will die if they perform a certain act, they will be unwilling to perform
that act. If the threat of death stays in the hand of a would-be murder, and we
abolish the death penalty, we will sacrifice the lives of many innocent victims
whose murders could have been deterred. But if, in fact, the death penalty does
not deter, and we continue to impose it, we have ...

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it is a necessary condition to achieving the
greatest balance of good over evil for everyone involved. Given the value we
place on life and our obligation to minimize suffering and pain whenever
possible, if a less severe alternative to the death penalty exists which would
accomplish the same goal, we are duty bound to reject the death penalty in favor
of the less severe alternative.
There is no evidence to support the claim that the death penalty is a
more effective deterrent of violent crime than say, life imprisonment. In fact,
statistical studies that have compared the murder rates of jurisdictions with
and without the death penalty have shown that the rate of murder is not ...

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