Capital Punishment

The Furman Vs. Georgia decision "invalidated all existing death sentence statutes as violative of the 8th amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment and thus depopulated state death rows of 629 occupants" (Berger 353). This decision was reached not because, as Justice Stewart put it, the "death penalty as actually applied was unconstitutionally arbitrary" (Berger 353). The question of whether executions are a "cruel" form of punishment may no longer be an argument against capital punishment now that it can be done with lethal injections, but it is still very "unusual" in that it only applies to a select number of individuals making it completely discriminatory and arbitrary. .
             For the past decades, capital punishment has been one of the most hotly debated topics in America. The debate is complex and complicated because it involves legal, logic, philosophical, social, political, and moral questions. There are four key issues at the root of the capital punishment debate, all of them stirring up America's feelings towards this issue. They are 1. Deterrence 2. Retribution 3. Arbitrariness 4. The danger of mistake. .
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             A major purpose of criminal punishment is to conclude future criminal conduct. The deterrence theory suggests that a rational person will avoid criminal behavior if the severity of the punishment outweighs the benefits of the illegal conduct. It is believed that the fear of death "deters" people from committing a crime. Most studies have failed to produce evidence that the death penalty deterred murders more effectively than the threat of imprisonment. The reason for this is that few people are executed and so the death penalty is not a satisfactory deterrent. When comparisons are made between states with the death penalty and states without, the majority of death penalty states show murder rates higher than non-death penalty states. A look at neighboring death penalty and non-death penalty states show similar trends as death penalty states usually have a higher murder rate than their neighboring non-death penalty states (Horwitz 87).