Is The Death Penalty An Effective Deterrent?

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Capital punishment also known as the death penalty has been a potent tool in our country’s criminal justice system since the eighteenth century. There are different methods the system practice the death penalty, like lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, hanging and using a firing squad. This punishment is most likely the harshest of all, but it is given with just cause and is likely given to inmates who have committed a numerous amount of murder. Capital punishment is a delicate tool in our country’s justice system, there are many people that agree with it and those who oppose it, but there are reasons why it should remain. Is the capital punishment an effective deterrent? This essay is to inform the readers the effect and the controversy …show more content…

The study “Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates? The Views of Leading Criminologists”, was published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, came to a conclusion that there is an enormous number among America’s top criminologists that the research conducted on the deterrent question of the death penalty fails to support the threat of the death penalty. To be more specific the numbers show that in 1996 only 11.9% agreed that the capital punishment is a deterrent and in 2004 the number show that only 5.3% agreed that the punishment is a deterrent. This number show us how criminologists stop believing that the death penalty is a deterrent therefore is hasn’t affect to stop …show more content…

Some believe that the death we are responsible to punish those that deserve it, like does who commit heinous crimes such as murder. Others believe that the death penalty is morally and socially wrong, because killing is wrong and the Bible asks us not to kill in the book of Exodus. Everyone has their opinion, but morally killing those who kill and commit heinous crime shouldn’t be kill; by executing a criminal it makes us criminals protected by the law, because at the end of the discussion we are killing just like those

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