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Arguments for and Against the Death Penalty:Retentionist Arguments
Retentionist Arguments
• Executions have always been used, and capital punishment is inherent in human nature. It is fair to punish the wicked, and consequently the death penalty is favored by most Americans and used in three-quarters of the nations of the world, including Japan, which has an extremely low murder rate.
• The Bible describes methods of executing criminals. Many moral philosophers and religious leaders, such as Thomas More, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, did not oppose the death penalty; neither did the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
• The death penalty also seems to be in keeping with the current mode of dispensing punishment. Criminal law exacts proportionately harsher penalties for crimes based on their seriousness; this practice is testimony to a retributionist philosophy. Therefore, the harshest penalty for the most severe crime represents a logical step in the process.
• The death penalty is sometimes the only real threat available to deter crime. For example, prison inmates serving life sentences can be controlled only if they know that further transgressions can lead to death. Or a person committing a crime that carries with it a long prison sentence might be more likely to kill witnesses if the threat of death did not exist.
• Death is the ultimate incapacitation. Some offenders are so dangerous that they can never be safely let out in society. The death penalty is a sure way of preventing these people from ever harming others. More than 280 inmates on death row today had prior homicide convictions; if they had been executed for their first offenses, at least 280 innocent people would still be alive.
• The death penalty is cost effective. Considering the crowded prison system and the expense of keeping an inmate locked up for many years, an execution makes financial sense.
• Despite some allegations of racism, more whites are on death row than minorities, and there appears to be little racial difference in the rate of capital sentencing over the past thirty years.
• Deterrence. Punishment has a deterrent value. Crime is a rational process, and therefore it only stands to reason that the possibility of a death sentence will deter some of those who are contemplating murder.
• Fairness. It is only fair that “cold-blooded” killers pay for their crimes with their own lives.
• The moral issue. Moralists who reject the death penalty as a response to crime, even the crime of murder, hold that it is state-administered homicide. The moralist’s argument goes on to a consideration of the inevitable caprice in the administration of the death penalty. In addition, this argument makes the point that the majority of men and women executed have been African American or Hispanic, in spite of all the precautions against prejudice that have been built into the judicial process.
• The constitutional issue. Challenges to the legitimacy of capital punishment have built their case against the death penalty by the ambiguous language of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. What this challenge is all about is that the death penalty is unconstitutional.
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