The purpose our entire criminal justice system is to protect the rights of life, liberty, and property for all its citizens. To do this, the criminal justice system needs to make "plunder more painful and more dangerous than labor." In other words, the punishment for crime must be harsh enough to deter potential criminals. Under this mindset, the death penalty makes perfect sense. Here is a punishment that truly makes the criminal pay for his crime, stops the criminal from committing future crimes, and deters other criminals from committing the same crime. The purpose of the death penalty is to protect the right of Americans to live. .
If the purpose of the death penalty is to protect the lives of Americans, then the people that it is supposed to protect should be the focal point. In considering the death penalty and its merits and faults one cannot lose sight of the victims. These corpses are the people who have been, are being, and will be killed because our justice system is not working perfectly. In considering the death penalty these innocent individuals must never be forgotten. Millions of innocent men and women have already been slain, and thousands are killed every year. According to Time Magazine, in the United States more than 2,000,000 people are beaten, knifed, shot or otherwise assaulted each year, 23,000 fatally (Toufexis 53). In any discussion of the death penalty, one must remember that there are two sets of lives to be considered. Far too much emphasis is usually placed on the convicted murderer who is being executed, and the victim who has been killed is all but forgotten. Joseph Stalin once stated, "One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are statistics,"(Lowe 6). .
Once a murderer is caught and convicted, justice seems to demand that he at least be prevented from murdering someone else. After all, if the law is set up to protect our right to live, it seems as though it should be able to keep convicted murderers from murdering again.
