Arguments over capital punishment and the rightness or wrongness of it as a societal act have been made for decades in the United States. For a period in the 1970s, the issue may have seemed less vital because the Supreme Court had thrown out the nation's death penalty laws as being improperly drawn. The court did not say the death penalty was impossible but only that it was not being applied correctly in law at the time; capital punishment has since been restored. In spite of a number of challenges, capital punishment has been affirmed by the court and continues to be enforced. There is considerable public support for the death penalty, much of it related to a general trend toward demanding harsher penalties for criminals because of a fear of street crime and violence.
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Yet, such popular emotional responses should not be the deciding factor in public policy decisions, particularly decisions involving lives. The death penalty is held out as a deterrent, and yet there is as much evidence that there is no deterrent effect as there is that such an effect exists, Though proponents and opponents of the death penalty may argue over such data as can be found on issues of this sort, a more basic question is simply whether capital punishment is the right sort of thing for an advanced society to use. An examination of the issue will show that is not.
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Arguments on the two sides are offered respectively by Walter Berns on one side and Mary Meehan and Nathanson on the other, with Berns holding that capital punishment is right for a society to use as a tool, while Meehan and Stephen Nathanson hold that it is not. In explaining the essentials of this argument, George McKenna and Stanley Feingold note that capital punishment has an ancient history, though the definition of a capital crime and the methods used to put convicted persons to death have both changed. In recent times, even before the Supreme Court ruled against most capital punishment laws in 1972, executions in the United States were becoming very rare (McKenna and Feingold 172-173).
