Capital punishment 'lowers the tone' of society

Civilised societies do not tolerate torture, even if it can be shown that torture may deter, or produce other good effects.

In the same way many people feel that the death penalty is an inappropriate for a modern civilised society to respond to even the most dreadful crimes

NB: It's actually impossible to test the deterrent effect of a punishment in a rigorous way, as to do so would require knowing how many murders would have been committed in a particular state if the law had been different during the same time period.

Deterrence is a morally flawed concept

Even if capital punishment did act as a deterrent, is it acceptable for someone to pay for the predicted future crimes of others?

Some people argue that one may as well punish innocent people; it will have the same effect.

This isn't true - if people are randomly picked up off the street and punished as scapegoats the only consequence is likely to be that the public will be frightened to go out.

To make a scapegoat scheme effective it would be necessary to go through the appearance of a legitimate legal process and to present evidence which convinced the public that the person being punished deserved their punishment.

While some societies have operated their legal systems on the basis of fictional evidence and confessions extracted by torture, the ethical objections to such a system are sufficient to render the argument in the second paragraph pointless.

Brutalising society

Brutalising individuals

Statistics show that the death penalty leads to a brutalisation of society and an increase in murder rate. In the USA, more murders take place in states where capital punishment is allowed. In 2010, the murder rate in states where the death penalty has been abolished was 4.01 per cent per 100, 000 people. In states where the death penalty is used, the figure was 5.00 per cent. These calculations are based on figures from the FBI. The gap between death penalty states and non-death penalty states rose considerably from 4 per cent difference in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2010. Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report, from Death Penalty Information Center

Disturbed individuals may be angered and thus more likely to commit murder.

It is also linked to increased number of police officers murdered.

Brutalising the state

Capital punishment may brutalise society in a different and even more fundamental way, one that has implications for the state's relationship with all citizens.

Because most countries - but not all - do not execute people publicly, capital punishment is not a degrading public spectacle. But it is still a media circus, receiving great publicity, so that the public are well aware of what is being done on their behalf.

However this media circus takes over the spectacle of public execution in teaching the public lessons about justice, retribution, and personal responsibility for one's own actions.

Expense

In the USA capital punishment costs a great deal.

For example, the cost of convicting and executing Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City Bombing was over $13 million.

In New York and New Jersey, the high costs of capital punishment were one factor in those states' decisions to abandon the death penalty. New York spent about $170 million over 9 years and had no executions. New Jersey spent $253 million over a 25-year period and also had no executions. Source: Death Penalty Information Center

In countries with a less costly and lengthy appeals procedure, capital punishment seems like a much cheaper option than long-term imprisonment.

Counter-arguments

Those in favour of capital punishment counter with these two arguments:

It is a fallacy that capital punishment costs more than life without parole

Justice cannot be thought of in financial terms

People not responsible for their acts

This is not an argument against capital punishment itself, but against applying it wrongly.

Some countries, including the USA, have executed people proven to be insane.

It's generally accepted that people should not be punished for their actions unless they have a guilty mind - which requires them to know what they are doing and that it's wrong.

Therefore people who are insane should not be convicted, let alone executed. This doesn't prevent insane people who have done terrible things being confined in secure mental institutions, but this is done for public safety, not to punish the insane person.

To put it more formally: it is wrong to impose capital punishment on those who have at best a marginal capacity for deliberation and for moral agency.

A more difficult moral problem arises in the case of offenders who were sane at the time of their crime and trial but who develop signs of insanity before execution.

Applied unfairly

There has been much concern in the USA that flaws in the judicial system make capital punishment unfair.

One US Supreme Court Justice (who had originally supported the death penalty) eventually came to the conclusion that capital punishment was bound to damage the cause of justice.

Jurors

Jurors in many US death penalty cases must be 'death eligible'. This means the prospective juror must be willing to convict the accused knowing that a sentence of death is a possibility.

This results in a jury biased in favour of the death penalty, since no one who opposes the death penalty is likely to be accepted as a juror.

Lawyers

There's much concern in the USA that the legal system doesn't always provide poor accused people with good lawyers.

Out of all offenders who are sentenced to death, three quarters of those who are allocated a legal aid lawyer can expect execution, a figure that drops to a quarter if the defendant could afford to pay for a lawyer.

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