[素材库] DEATH SENTENCE：ON LAW AND MORALITY [复制链接]

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电梯直达

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发表于 2004-3-10 08:39:48 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

美国的那个连环杀人的已经被判死刑了~~~
希望对大家有用，呵呵
Arguments for and against the death penalty

Support for the death penalty varies widely from nation to nation, and it can be a highly contentious political issue, particularly in democracies that use it. A majority of adults in the United States appear to support its continuance (though like most political issues, the numbers vary widely depending on the exact question asked), but a highly vocal, organised minority of people in that country do not, and non-governmental organisations like Amnesty lobby against it globally. In Taiwan, the death penalty appears to have large amounts of public support, and there is little public movement to abolish it. By contrast, in most of Western Europe, public opinion overwhelming regards capital punishment as barbaric and there is little public support for its reinstatement. In countries where it has been abolished, debate is sometimes revived by particularly brutal murders, though few countries have brought it back after abolition.

Some of the major arguments used by those opposed to the death penalty include:

The death penalty is killing. Killing is wrong, therefore the death penalty is wrong.
This is a human rights violation.
Torture and cruelty are wrong. Many executions are botched and the executed suffer extended pain in dying, and even those who die instantly suffer extreme mental torture leading up to and during the preliminaries of the execution process.
Criminal proceedings are fallible. Many people facing the death penalty have been exonerated, sometimes only minutes before their scheduled execution. Others, however, have been executed before evidence clearing them is discovered. Whilst criminal trials not involving the death penalty can involve mistakes, there is at least the opportunity for mistakes to be corrected.
At least in the United States, poor people and those from ethnic minorities are more likely to be executed than whites convicted of similar crimes. Hence, its application is selective and unfair. Additionally, it is argued that the race of the victim can also affect the likelihood of the application of the death penalty, which again is unfair.
It can encourage police misconduct as in the incident described in the documentary film The Thin Blue Line. In the late 1970s, an innocent man named Randall Adams was framed by the Dallas County police department in Texas for a notorious murder of a police officer because they knew the more likely suspect, David Harris, was still a minor and thus ineligible for the death penalty so Adams had to serve as a scapegoat to execute.
It is not a deterrent because anyone that would be deterred by the death penalty would already have been deterred by life in prison, and people that are not deterred by that wouldn't be stopped by any punishment.
With mandatory appeals and enhanced requirements for capital cases, the cost of a death penalty case far exceeds (usually by a factor of ten) the cost of a trial and life imprisonment.
Different groups of death penalty opponents favour different arguments. Core death-penalty opponents are perhaps more likely to primarily base their opposition on "the death penalty is murder" arguments, and advance the issues of wrong convictions and ethnic bias to convince waverers.

Key arguments for supporters of the death penalty include:

That people committing the most heinous crimes (usually murder, in Western countries that practice the death penalty) have forfeited the right to life so executing them is not murder.
Government is not an individual and is given far more powers; therefore, executions are not "murder."
Since the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, a murderer is likely to murder again, so execution prevents future murders.
That it provides peace of minds for victims of crime and their families.
Beliefs in reciprocity or lex talionis - essentially, "an eye for an eye" - which is part of the concept of justice for many people.
That it is in fact less cruel than prolonged sentences of imprisonment, especially under the conditions that would be popularly demanded for heinous criminals.
That it is explicitly allowed in constitutions and other documents of basic law.
That it provides extra leverage for the prosecutor to deal for important testimony and information.
That it enjoys democratic support of the people.
That it deters crime.
There is ongoing debate whether capital punishment reduces crime rates, because potential murderers (or other criminals) would be too scared of punishment to commit crime, or it doesn't at all affect crime rate, because potential criminals think they won't be caught, so they don't care about punishment until it's too late. There are even studies that have concluded that the death penalty appears to encourage murder. However, like many questions in the social sciences, actual research data on this question can be (and is) interpreted very differently by people with differing predispositions towards capital punishment. In any event, the actual effectiveness or otherwise of it is largely irrelevant to many who feel strongly about the debate, as their views are based on other factors.