Capital Punishment
1 Imagine being ready to die. On January 7, 1988, at 3:19 a.m., Texas began to execute convicted murderer Robert Streetland by pumping lethal drugs into his veins. Before he was pronounced dead seven minutes later, the telephone rang in the death chamber. The governor's office had received word that the United States Supreme Court was ready to consider a new motion of appeal. In the words of a prison spokesman, "The Supreme Court wanted to know where we were in the process, but by then it was too late."2 I stand before you today to discuss the issue of capital punishment. Should the death penalty be administered to those who are deemed guilty of murder in a court of law? Based upon your answers to my class survey, if this decision were left up to this class, 75 percent of you would sentence the guilty defendant to death by way of lethal gas, lethal injection, hanging, or electrocution.3 In my speech, I want to persuade you to reassess your view of capital punishment. My arguments will address the following issues relative to capital punishment: the injustice of capital punishment, the immorality of capital punishment, and capital punishment as a deterrent to crime. First of a
As criminologist Hugo Adam Bedeau has stated, often people are sentenced to death and executed not because they have been found to be uncontrollably violent, but because they are too poor to purchase a first-rate lawyer to defend them. In other words, if the murderer is not likely to think about the prospect of capital punishment before committing a crime, or is not able to think about it, then capital punishment cannot logically work as a deterrent to the commission of that crime. We must realize that capital punishment is immoral. As the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau recently reported in its report on capital punishment, a major problem with the concept of deterrence is that it requires the would-be murderer to contemplate the consequences of his or her crime. People convicted of murdering whites, Baldus concluded, were eleven times more likely to be sentenced to death row than people convicted of killing blacks. It is very unlikely that capital punishment would deter many of the people who are committing capital crimes. 6 In addition to being discriminatory, capital punishment is also immoral. The Bible says, "Thou shalt not kill. As the Columbia Law Review reports, "Many people who commit murder may not be able because of mental illness, mental retardation, or excessive emotion to realistically accept the danger of being caught, convicted, and executed. " The Bible does not say, "Thou shalt not kill except in cases of murder, treason or capital crimes. And this is a very controversial point with strong opinions on both sides. "The system under which criminals are sentenced," he says, "is such that race often plays a prominent role in determining whether they will live or die. 9 But there is yet a third issue that we must confront, and that is whether capital punishment is an effective deterrent to crime.
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Acceptance Essays
