Rough Draft: Capital Punishment in Criminal Justice

Rough Draft: Capital Punishment in Criminal Justice

Rough Draft Due Week 7 and worth 150 points Instructions: Writing Activity 3 has two sections to complete. You will use the writing templates in Webtext chapter 7 to complete them. Once you complete all templates, you will be able to download your work and submit it to Blackboard. The Webtext will guide you through the process.

Section 1 Rough Draft Create your Rough Draft by using the writing templates in Webtext chapter 7.

Your rough draft should include an introduction paragraph, 2-5 body paragraphs for all supporting points in your paper, a counter perspective, and a conclusion paragraph. While the rough draft should be complete, it does not have to be perfect. After you submit it, you will get feedback from your instructor to help make revisions before submitting the final version of your paper in week

SAMPLE ANSWER

Capital Punishment in Criminal Justice

Capital punishment, also referred to as the death penalty is a justice system where the offenders, when found guilty, are killed. Several justifications have been made for the penalty and against it and the debates have advanced with time. The death penalty dates back to Eighteenth Century B.C. in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for different crimes (Paternoster, 1991). The reasons for the penalty varied among different societies and they included sexual crimes, blasphemy, magic as well as a violation of religious obligations among others (McFeely, 2019). In history, capital punishment involved various ways of killing an individual including crucifixion, stripping the skin off an individual, stoning, burning, dismemberment and crushing among other methods. In the modern world, industrialized countries may use lethal injections among other modern forms. However, in the USA, capital punishment is given through the firing squad (McFeely, 2019). In the USA the punishment has been used for treason, murder, and people involved in the use of spies by governments to obtain political and military information (Vila and Morris, 1997). Although the pro-death crusaders argue that it serves as a deterrent to others who would want to engage in similar crimes, the argument is often tempered by some more critical factors.

The criminal justice system is tasked with the responsibility of reflecting the moral views of society. As a result, inflicting the penalty of death on its citizenry entirely violates religious teachings on the sanctity of life. In various religious beliefs, there is a supreme God that gives and takes life, and therefore, when one ends the lives of others, they seem to be assuming the role of God. Also, Capital punishments infringe on the inviolability, sanctity, and dignity of an individual’s life as only God should be allowed the right to take the lives of people. In addition, the action is morally wrong as it involves committing a crime as compensation for another crime or simply following the example of the criminal by carrying out an equally bad action (Binder et al. 2016). One main characteristic of capital punishment is that it ends up denying the offender the opportunity of rehabilitation, which is supposed to be the main goal of the justice system (Haney, Weill, and Lynch, 2015).

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Secondly, the criminal justice system has been filled with errors previously, and consequently, an innocent individual may be put to death for a mistake that they did not commit (Brown, & McGee, 2018). Also, the capital punishment process is expensive and there are several costs involved including special prison housing and staff costs. The governments spend a significant amount of tax payer’s money to fund such processes. The money would be used to carry out other important activities like educating the poor in society or coming up with programs that would seek to establish corrective behaviors or deter youths from getting into crime (Brown, & McGee, 2018).

The main argument that surrounds the topic is the ability of the capital punishment penalty to effectively serve as a deterrent to crime (Rice, 2017). The idea behind capital punishment is that when criminals are punished by being put to death, potential criminals will be discouraged from crime. However, this does not seem to be the case considering the proportional severity deterrent and economic theories of human nature. They establish that a penalty served for a crime is supposed to allow an individual to calculate the benefits of crime vis-à-vis the crime. If it was to be true that physiological pleasures of crime are weighed against the pain of execution, then there would be no cases of homicide as well as other cases that call for the death penalty. The growing statistics of homicides across different parts of eth United States of America dispute the fact that the death penalty serves as a deterrent to crime in modern times. Therefore this proves that there should be other methods that would be adopted to help people revert from their criminal ways and the death penalty is not effective.

Rough Draft: Capital Punishment in Criminal Justice

In conclusion, capital punishment should be abolished from the legal system because it is morally wrong and is very costly in addition to the fact that it gives man the position of God considering everyone has one life. Also, it has been established that it is not an effective tool to act as a deterrent to crime as evidenced by the increase in the levels of crime in the USA as well as in different parts of the world.

References

Binder, G., Fissell, B., & Weisberg, R. (2016). Capital punishment of unintentional felony

murder. Notre Dame L. Rev., 92, 1141.

Brown, L. L., & McGee, S. G. (2018). Social Work and Capital Punishment: a Call to

Action. Journal of Human Rights and Social Work, 3(4), 229-239.

Haney, C., Weill, J., & Lynch, M. (2015). The death penalty. In B. L. Cutler & P. A. Zapf

(Eds.), APA handbooks in psychology. APA handbook of forensic psychology, Vol. Criminal investigation, adjudication, and sentencing outcomes (pp. 451-510). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14462-017

McFeely, W, S. (2019). Trial and Error: Capital Punishment in U.S. History. Retrieved

From: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5420

Rice, S. K. (2017). Darkness to Light: Procedural Injustice as Crisis for Capital

Punishment Legitimacy. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 15(3), 13.

Paternoster, R. (1991). Capital punishment in America (p. 20). New York: Lexington Books

Vila, B., & Morris, C. (Eds.). (1997). Capital Punishment in the United States: A documentary

history. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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