Death Penalty
An on-going Debate on Ethics and Morality
The debate on whether the death penalty, or capital punishment, should be utilized in the United States is best seen in the varied laws that exist within each state. For this reason, many states, most of which are in the northern parts of the country are against capital punishment, while many southern states support this kind of a law. The U.S. map is quite divided and many have joined the on-going debate on whether or not the U.S. should utilize this form of punishment. Despite the fact that most industrialized, westernized countries have rid themselves of the death penalty, and despite the fact that many argue cruelty and lack of civilized due process in utilizing such punishment, many of those who uphold the death penalty claim that it does work, especially in deterring criminals. The three articles presented below were thus retrieved in order to conduct further research on this issue and examine what beliefs are still held and why, from both the pro and against camps.
In choosing the three articles, the search topic was capital punishment. The ____ (School Name) Library provided over 300 results for this topic. When I tried typing death penalty, the same number of results appeared. However, I noticed that these results were not organized chronologically and thus decided to organize the search results by date, with the most recent first. This helped, as it narrowed down...
I decided to choose the subject of capital punishment solely and not focus on any of the
justice or forensics aspects presented, and chose the three most recent and most pertinent articles within this subject.
The first article is entitled "A balanced study of the death penalty," and is written by Paul Rosenberg of the Denver Post. This article is aimed to give the reader a small glimpse into the extensive history of the death penalty in the U.S. from an objective standpoint. The author does not argue either for or against the practice, but simply elucidates the process and why it has existed in this country for so long, and in such different way in many of today's states. The most important piece of information in this piece is the author's
explanation of why some states still choose to utilize the death penalty. For instance, southern states, many of which still utilize capital punishment, are traditionally believed to follow old English
law (which placed a great stress upon this form of 'deterrence'). Furthermore, the South is also known to have deep seated prejudices against African-Americans, many of whom…
