Death penalty has always been a problem in this country for half a century. Since that time, people have become more concerned about the rightness or wrongness of this topic and have written many articles about it. There are two groups of people who have different opinions about this topic. The first group agrees with death penalty and the second group disagrees with it. Usually these people are trying to persuade each other about their opinions. Here I will compare two different articles about the death penalty to see which one of them is more persuasive.
The first article named " Death Penalty Is Justice," written by Edward I. Koch, is trying to persuade its audience that death penalty is justice. According to this article, the author has been in public service for twenty-two years and has "heard the pros and cons of capital punishment expressed with special intensity" during these years. This shows intrinsic ethos because the author has the authority to talk about capital punishment and its pros and cons. Moreover, he has been a district leader councilman, congressman, and mayor, which adds to the power of his ethos. Also as a footnote it has been written that Koch has served as mayor of New York City for 12 years and he is also the author of Mayor: An Autobiography. This is an example of extrinsic ethos, which gives more power to the authority of Koch.
The other article, which is called "No Death Penalty", written by David Bruck, is persuading people about the injustice of death penalty. When looking at the source of article, it mentions that Bruck is a lawyer in the South Carolina office of appellate defense and many of his clients are prisoners on death row. This shows extrinsic ethos to persuade people of his ideas. Moreover, Bruck has mentioned that the "moral" argument about death penalty "had to be considered in the abstract" by the time that no one was being executed in the United States.