Death penalty advocates rationalize capital punishment under the principle of an eye for an eye which is the belief that punishment should fit the crime. In particular, people who support capital punishment dispute that murderers should be put to death in retribution for their crimes and that such vengeance serves justice for murder victims and their survivors. Death penalty opponents stress the purity of life, quarrelling that killing is forever wrong whether by a person or by the state and that justice is best served by way of reconciliation (The Death Penalty: Specific Issues, 2010).

Opponents of the death penalty dispute that there is a hazard of putting to death innocent people, and cite real cases in which defendants were incorrectly convicted of, and occasionally put to death for, capital crimes. Death penalty opponents see current laws which limit the appeals process as equivalent to mounting the likelihood for putting to death innocent people. Death penalty proponents dispute that there are adequate protections against putting to death persons and that the hazard of executing the not guilty is minute (The Death Penalty: Specific Issues, 2010).

Advocates of the death penalty have called for the speeding up of executions and restricting appeals, which are costly and which frequently appear to be frivolous appeals meant to holdup the death penalty procedure. While death penalty opponents quarrel that restricting appeals, whether to save expenses or to speed up executions comes only at the price of deteriorating due process and escalating the odds that innocent people will be convicted and put to death (The Death Penalty: Specific Issues, 2010).

Death penalty opponents dispute that capital punishment is costly; costing more than it would cost to put people in prison for life. Proponents of the death penalty dispute that the death penalty is a cost-effective option to life imprisonment, or that death penalty expenses could be decreased by limiting appeals. Death penalty opponents dispute...

is handed down randomly and unjustly, predominantly in regards to race and insufficient defense for underprivileged people (The Death Penalty: Specific Issues, 2010).
In spite of U.S. Supreme Court rulings to the contrary, a lot of death penalty opponents think capital punishment is in and of itself cruel and unusual punishment and in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, considering that developing principles of decency have shown the death penalty to be a barbaric practice that should be done away with. Specific ways of execution also recurrently come under attack as breaching the Eighth Amendment bar on cruel and unusual punishment. Death penalty advocates oppose that the framers of the Constitution took capital punishment for granted, and did not believe it cruel and unusual. Some proponents of the death penalty think some techniques of execution, such as lethal injection, are more civilized than others (The Death Penalty: Specific Issues, 2010).

The dispute over the death penalty has been going on for years and more than likely will go on for many years to come. There will always be those that think that the death penalty is necessary to deter people from carrying out certain crimes in the future. While there are others that will forever argue that it is a cruel and unusual punishment and should be done away with altogether.