Capital Punishment in the US

¶ … death penalty in the United States today? The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reporting for the U.S. Department of Justice that in 2013 "the estimated number of murders in the nation was 14,196"(www.fbi.gov). According to The Death Penalty Information Center, between 1976 and February 2015, the number of cumulative executions per capita was the highest in the State of Texas, with 521. The state with the highest number in population California, reported 13 such executions for the stated period.

Considering the number of under 1500 of the total of cumulative executions in the U.S. between 1976 and February 2015 on one side, and the estimated number of murders in only one year in the U.S., I am safe to conclude that a very small number of murders are effectively punished with the death penalty in the U.S. This is vital information concerning the death penalty and its use in the U.S. It takes years of gathering evidence, testimonies and deliberation before reaching a verdict of the death penalty.

The deterrence justification of the death penalty is highly debatable because without the credible confessions of most potential murderess it simply unreliable. Numbers alone are also weak justifiers or arguments for or against the death penalty in the U.S. A better approach would be to take a look at the alternative: long life imprisonment without the right for parole. Some might even consider this a harsher punishment than the death penalty.

However, most of those who are on the death row are asking for a sentence commutation, appearing to favor life long imprisonment with no chance forever being released from prison instead of being put to death. I agree with J. Angelo Corlett who is emphasizing in his book Responsibility and Punishment the vital role of considering any form of punishment from its relationship with the degree of responsibility it carries.

After all, why should it be humane to incarcerate a human being for any number of reasons and less humane to terminate one's life? Angelo Corlett dismisses thus the role deterrence may play in coming up with arguments pro-or against the death penalty.

With this "moral issue" out of the way, Corlett concludes that "capital punishment can be justified so long as the offender was strongly responsible for illicitly taking the life of, say, at least one other innocent person with attending circumstances such as rape, assault, with no significant mitigating factors present in the crime. In other words, first-degree murderers should be executed according to due process of law"(Corlett, 2013). The death penalty is justified simply because it is a matter of justice.

Regardless of the numbers of issues with the faults of the justice system in the U.S., the death penalty in itself remains a justifiable punishment for a violent crime such as premeditated first-degree murder, committed in a country governed democratically. A community must be able to express its adverseness to this kind of violent act by agreeing to sentence the offender to death, officially, in the court of law.

There are famous examples of criminals convicted for their hideous crimes such as: Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, Theodore Bundy, Richard Speck, to name only a few, whose death sentences Matthew Kramer calls both "morally obligatory" and "morally legitimate." The characteristics of their crimes are, without a doubt, placing.