The Threat Of Death

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justification is the severity of punishment
(Calebresi 19). This means, put simply, to punish for a crime in a way that the
punishment outweighs the crime. If the punishment for robbing a bank is to
spend one day in jail, then bank robbing would become a daily occurance. On the
same note, if there is a reward for a lost item of jewelry and the reward is
less than the selling price for that jewelry, the finder has no reason to bring
it back. On the other hand, if the reward exceeds the value of the jewelry, the
new owner will bring it back very promptly. In the case of capital punishment,
if a person wants someone dead badly enough, and the punishment for murder is a
short stay in prison, what will possibly keep that person from doing the
unthinkable (Van Den Haag 68). If a person is afraid for their life, then the
stakes for their actions are much higher, probably even too high for most people.
Many psychologists believe that these "stakes" do not even have to be ...

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that span sixty-six years, he
concludes that each execution prevents around seven or eight people from
committing murder (Worsnop 402). In 1985, an economist from the University of
North Carolina by the name of Stephen K. Layson publishes a report that shows
that every execution of a murderer deters eighteen would be murderers (Guernsey
68). While the numbers from these
studies might seem minute compared to the large number of murders committed
every day in the United States, the numbers become quite large when discussed
in the terms of the nearly four thousand executions that occurred in this
country over the last sixty-five years (Guernsey 65).
While advocates of the death ...

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