DEATH PENALTY: LEGAL AND MORAL ISSUES

Submitted by:
Barro, Rhea Mae M.
Cairoding, Jabber A.

Submitted to:
Ms. Jan Vaughnce Yrish Plaza
 Historically, the death penalty debate has been about ethics. Those in favor argue that
the penalty should be commensurate to the offense, and that anyone who takes a life deserves
to be taken. Those who disagree argue that we have no control over who lives and who dies.
Taking someone's life, even as a form of retribution, is still considered murder. However,
there has been a trend in recent years toward financial motives, discriminatory legislation,
and the issue of innocence, with the manner of execution also gaining relevance. One reason
supporters of the death sentence it is its effectiveness as a deterrent to crime. According to
advocates of the death penalty, future criminals will be scared of such a harsh sentence and
will be less inclined to perpetrate crimes like murder and rape. The death penalty is usually
justified on the grounds that society has a moral obligation to safeguard its citizens' safety
and well-being. Murderers put this security and well-being at risk. Only by putting convicted
murderers to death can community ensure that they will not kill once more. The death penalty
may be used for crimes such as murder and rape, depending on the country or state that
authorizes the practice. There are serial offenders who are not afraid to rape and murder again
since they know they will just be imprisoned. People who are truly sincerely anti-death
penalty, on the other hand, believe that taking another person's life is wrong even for the
state. Furthermore, many individuals consider that capital punishment is a crime against the
community or that it is unfairly harmful to the person who is sentenced to death. Concerns
that the punishment fails to fulfill its stated goals and is too fraught with uncertainty to be a
valid sentence, even if a state has the legal authority to take a life, accentuate—or in some
cases, replace—the conviction that taking a life is wrong.

Public defenders, grantees, and other campaign people who advocated for the death
penalty tried to alter public perceptions of the death penalty by spreading awareness of the
system's numerous deficiencies, like the reality that it is expensive, disproportionately affects
the poor and people of color, has the potential to kill innocent people, and fails to stop
criminals. Each death penalty affects a number of people, including the prisoner's family, the
victim's family, prison employees, the execution team, and defence lawyers, in addition to the
criminal awaiting execution. Lawyers, too, perform a vital role in the process, especially
post-conviction counsel who arrive after a death sentence has been handed down and seek to
block the execution. At this stage, there is a great demand, resources are limited, and the line
between capital punishment and other sorts of public defender may appear to be quite
apparent. For a postconviction capital defense lawyer, the stakes are as high as they can be:
losing a case means losing a client's life. Whether or not attorneys see the killing, the trauma
of losing a client in this manner is substantial and, in some cases, extremely durable. Lawyers
may suffer apathy, grief, rage, panic responses, memories, and emotions of dissociation or
melancholy after the occurrence, which can linger for days, weeks, months, or years. In
addition, it is applied inefficiently because 2% of US counties execute 50% of the death
penalties. These ideas were disseminated through state-by-state operations as well as massive
media campaigns led by national lobbying organizations. There was use of social media, op-
eds, planned letters to the editor, paid advertising, individual appearances, as well as hired
production. It was also crucial that this information come from reliable sources competent of
influencing perspective, such as evangelicals and conservatives, who believe the death
penalty is ineffective, wasteful, and unjust; victims' families, who believe the lengthy death
penalty process prevents them from achieving closure and argue that the money saved by
closing death row could be better spent on victims' services or reopening cold cases; and the
wrongfully convicted, who are living in prison. Moreover, every day, people are hung or
condemned to death for a variety of crimes, some of which should not be criminalized. It
could be used for drug crimes in certain nations, but only for terrorism and killing in others.
Some countries apply capital punishment to individuals who were under the age of 18 at the
time the crime took place, while others apply it to people with intellectual disabilities, and yet
others apply it after prosecutions, all of which are evident violations of international law and
standards. People on death row may be sentenced to death for years and have no idea when or
if they will be seeing their family for the last time. 

As a result, it looks that utilitarianism would oppose death punishment since it

attempts to bring the criminal tremendous misery. However, in this scenario, the societal
impact would be measured. According to Vaughn (131), from the viewpoint of utilitarianism,
the death of a prisoner deemed a risk to society would give not only economic benefits but
also solace to victims and society as a whole, as well as a sense that justice had been served.
Bentham's felicific calculus is a famous method for assessing the advantages and
disadvantages of an ethical issue. When applied to the death penalty, the following results
(Vaughn 134):
1. When a criminal who killed or raped others is brought to justice, victims and society
as a whole are likely to feel relief.
2. Satisfaction will begin as soon as the act is performed and will most likely persist for
several years, as long as the memory is preserved.
3. Although the majority of people are likely to be satisfied, some may oppose to the
death sentence owing to religious or ethical views.
4. Society is glad each time justice is delivered, and there are many people behind bars
who deserve the death sentence.
5. The process's roughness has the ability to evoke unpleasant feelings. Furthermore, an
innocent person may be sentenced to death.
According to the foregoing equation, utilitarianism supports death punishment as a way of
exacting justice, saving money on prison maintenance, and providing emotional solace to
victims of violent criminals.
On the other hand, the most usually stated reason for the death penalty is deterrence. The
assumption is that the possibility of being executed in the future will deter a substantial
percentage of individuals from committing a horrible act that they would otherwise do.
Deterrence theory is not primarily concerned with preventing more killings by a previously
convicted death-penalty defendant. That comes under the category of incapacity.
While on the deontological perspective, in most circumstances, killing is wrong, and this is
true regardless of the consequences or influence on general well-being. Many (but not all)
deontologists think that capital punishment is a moral evil. Any deontological prohibition
against the wrongful infliction of death, on the other hand, appears to be equivocal on the
moral position of capital punishment if significant numbers of killings must be averted.
 Mankind are a continually developing species, not just in physical form but also in
emotional and intellectual context. For centuries, every ruler in every nation has seen the
death sentence as an effective weapon for those who risk a society's overall peace and
tranquillity by committing crimes. However, as human civilization progressed, individuals
gained a deeper awareness of the repercussions of the death sentence. This type of capital
punishment resorts to physically removing offenders in order to avert unrest and restore order
to society. In his masterpiece, On Crimes and Punishments, published in 1764, Marquis of
Beccaria, an Italian philosopher and politician, urged for the first time the abolition or tightly
limited usage of the capital punishment. The death sentence, the oldest and simplest form of
punishment, has become a difficult matter and an ongoing debate in the modern world, with
many governments abolishing it as a form of punishment. [Although the death penalty may
dissuade offenders, it is nevertheless a cruel manner of executing a human beings and so
cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.] There is no question that the capital punishment
has persisted for thousands of years for a cause, and it has stayed a weapon used by leaders to
limit the predisposition of humans to commit serious crimes. This type of punishment
represents the government's attitude regarding offenders, and the peace and justice system
feels it is in charge of a country's security and tranquillity. Those in places of power have
long believed that the death penalty is far more successful in curbing crime than alternative
types of punishment. However, as human civilization grew, a rising proportion of countries
around the world eliminated the death sentence, apparently for humanitarian purposes,
because these countries saw it as barbaric. According to the most recent statistics from
Amnesty International, "76 nations and territories have abolished the death penalty for all
crimes." This implies that as humanity continue to evolve towards a higher level of
civilization, the death penalty as a form of punishment will likely be eliminated.
Dr. David A. Hoekema's argument in one of his articles titled Death Penalty: The Issue of
Justification that "when studies have tried to compare the murder rates for the past fifty years
in nations that utilise the death penalty and in adjoining states which have eliminated it, the
figures have in every case been quite similar; the death penalty has had no diversion effect"
demonstrates the futility of the death penalty as a deterrent to criminals (Hoekema). The
author's information refutes the notion that the death penalty is an effective tool for
preventing crime.
Death penalty supporters claim that capital punishment is required to provide vengeance for
the crime. They believe that the victim's family suffers through a painful experience, and that
in order to offer them justice, the criminal must be punished equally. However, when we look
at it from an ethical standpoint, we can see that murdering or taking a human life, whether
done by a person, ruler, or government, is not a proper thing to do. Taking a life before it
ends naturally is blatantly against God. Religions all around the globe maintain the same
philosophical position that taking a human life is against the spirit of mankind. In terms of
revenge, would the grieving family of a victim find satisfaction in retaliation when the
criminal is executed? Most certainly not! On the other side, if the offender is imprisoned, the
family will feel relieved that the wrongdoer has been imprisoned and will no longer be a
menace to society. This, without a doubt, is the proper punishment for the offense, rather than
killing the victim, which is against natural rules.
Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez argue in their article, Capital Punishment: Our Duty or
Our Doom, that "the capital punishment is not necessary to achieve the advantage of
safeguarding the public from killers who may attack again." Imprisoning murderers for life
"is doing the same stuff without having us all to murder another soul" (Andre, Velasquez).
These authors clearly have a valid point to convey. Death penalty supporters constantly
highlight that it is critical to kill hardened offenders because they are a threat to society and
their elimination would eliminate the probability of the occurrence crimes. In this context, it
is evident that if the purpose is simply to prohibit criminals from committing future crimes,
incarcerating them will achieve the same result. As a result, the death penalty cannot be
defended although as a required safety precaution in a modern society with other methods of
crime control.

It is abundantly evident that the death penalty cannot be allowed as a mechanism of

retribution for reducing crime in society today. Its legitimacy is called into question due to its
ineffectiveness on reducing crime as well as our desire as a civilized society to avoid
barbarianism. It is past time for the government to focus on constructive initiatives that
educate individuals about the impact of crime on our society instead of allowing for them to
commit serious crimes and penalizing them for it. Despite abstaining from actions that make
us complicit in the loss of human life, our priority should be to improve human situations by
offering equality of opportunity to all individuals, regardless of caste, creed, or color, and to
reduce immorality, that appears to be the fundamental cause of crimes. Communicate
effectively and focused policy lobbying reinforce each other. Grassroots actions to assist
legal efforts to shift states away from or away from using the death sentence would help
propagate the notion that the punishment was obsolete. As states abolished the death
sentence, and juries, prosecutors, and the general public rejected it, proponents would speak
for a national consensus to illustrate the shifting norms of decency. We reject capital
punishment not just for what it does to people who commit heinous crimes, but also for what
it does to society as a whole. The increased reliance on the death sentence dehumanizes all of
us and demonstrates a growing disregard for human life. We cannot defeat crime just by
killing criminals, nor can we restore the lives of innocent people by putting an end to the
existence of those guilty of the crime. The capital punishment perpetuates the sad delusion
which we can protect life by taking it.
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