Capital Punishment

Pauline Giron

English 1C

Professor Davies

May 14, 2011

When Two Wrongs Make a Right

Capital punishment in the United States can be traced back to 1607, when the first known execution took place in the colony of Jamestown - although records can only be traced back to 1930, when official record keeping within the Bureau of Justice began. Currently all but 17 states in America practice the death penalty; each state has its own set of laws regarding the same. Executions took place without interruption from 1930 to 1967. The law was challenged and won in the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Furman vs. Georgia, 408 U.S. (1972), where the laws were “characterized as ‘arbitrary and capricious,’ the majority ruled that they constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the due process guarantees of the 14th Amendment” (Green). After the Gregg decision of 1976 which reinstated the death penalty, the first execution took place in 1977. Despite being legally sanctioned by the states and by the Supreme Court, capital punishment is morally unjust because of the hypocrisy of punishing killing with killing, and the flaws within the justice system that create doubt as to whether the person being killed is indeed guilty; thus, capital punishment must be stopped.

Sentencing a convicted murderer to be murdered as the form of punishment proves only two things: hypocrisy and injustice. Hypocrisy in that illegal killing being corrected by legal killing is just, yet at the same time, unjust because murder is never just. According to Martin Luther King Jr., the definition of a just law is one that is in line with his god’s law or natural law. He further asserts that, “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal.” This difference is hypocrisy, at its finest. The distinction between legal and illegal...