compare and contrast essay death penalty

5 Death Penalty Essays Everyone Should Know

Capital punishment is an ancient practice. It’s one that human rights defenders strongly oppose and consider as inhumane and cruel. In 2019, Amnesty International reported the lowest number of executions in about a decade. Most executions occurred in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt . The United States is the only developed western country still using capital punishment. What does this say about the US? Here are five essays about the death penalty everyone should read:

“When We Kill”

By: Nicholas Kristof | From: The New York Times 2019

In this excellent essay, Pulitizer-winner Nicholas Kristof explains how he first became interested in the death penalty. He failed to write about a man on death row in Texas. The man, Cameron Todd Willingham, was executed in 2004. Later evidence showed that the crime he supposedly committed – lighting his house on fire and killing his three kids – was more likely an accident. In “When We Kill,” Kristof puts preconceived notions about the death penalty under the microscope. These include opinions such as only guilty people are executed, that those guilty people “deserve” to die, and the death penalty deters crime and saves money. Based on his investigations, Kristof concludes that they are all wrong.

Nicholas Kristof has been a Times columnist since 2001. He’s the winner of two Pulitizer Prices for his coverage of China and the Darfur genocide.

“An Inhumane Way of Death”

By: Willie Jasper Darden, Jr.

Willie Jasper Darden, Jr. was on death row for 14 years. In his essay, he opens with the line, “Ironically, there is probably more hope on death row than would be found in most other places.” He states that everyone is capable of murder, questioning if people who support capital punishment are just as guilty as the people they execute. Darden goes on to say that if every murderer was executed, there would be 20,000 killed per day. Instead, a person is put on death row for something like flawed wording in an appeal. Darden feels like he was picked at random, like someone who gets a terminal illness. This essay is important to read as it gives readers a deeper, more personal insight into death row.

Willie Jasper Darden, Jr. was sentenced to death in 1974 for murder. During his time on death row, he advocated for his innocence and pointed out problems with his trial, such as the jury pool that excluded black people. Despite worldwide support for Darden from public figures like the Pope, Darden was executed in 1988.

“We Need To Talk About An Injustice”

By: Bryan Stevenson | From: TED 2012

This piece is a transcript of Bryan Stevenson’s 2012 TED talk, but we feel it’s important to include because of Stevenson’s contributions to criminal justice. In the talk, Stevenson discusses the death penalty at several points. He points out that for years, we’ve been taught to ask the question, “Do people deserve to die for their crimes?” Stevenson brings up another question we should ask: “Do we deserve to kill?” He also describes the American death penalty system as defined by “error.” Somehow, society has been able to disconnect itself from this problem even as minorities are disproportionately executed in a country with a history of slavery.

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and author. He’s argued in courts, including the Supreme Court, on behalf of the poor, minorities, and children. A film based on his book Just Mercy was released in 2019 starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

“I Know What It’s Like To Carry Out Executions”

By: S. Frank Thompson | From: The Atlantic 2019

In the death penalty debate, we often hear from the family of the victims and sometimes from those on death row. What about those responsible for facilitating an execution? In this opinion piece, a former superintendent from the Oregon State Penitentiary outlines his background. He carried out the only two executions in Oregon in the past 55 years, describing it as having a “profound and traumatic effect” on him. In his decades working as a correctional officer, he concluded that the death penalty is not working . The United States should not enact federal capital punishment.

Frank Thompson served as the superintendent of OSP from 1994-1998. Before that, he served in the military and law enforcement. When he first started at OSP, he supported the death penalty. He changed his mind when he observed the protocols firsthand and then had to conduct an execution.

“There Is No Such Thing As Closure on Death Row”

By: Paul Brown | From: The Marshall Project 2019

This essay is from Paul Brown, a death row inmate in Raleigh, North Carolina. He recalls the moment of his sentencing in a cold courtroom in August. The prosecutor used the term “closure” when justifying a death sentence. Who is this closure for? Brown theorizes that the prosecutors are getting closure as they end another case, but even then, the cases are just a way to further their careers. Is it for victims’ families? Brown is doubtful, as the death sentence is pursued even when the families don’t support it. There is no closure for Brown or his family as they wait for his execution. Vivid and deeply-personal, this essay is a must-read for anyone who wonders what it’s like inside the mind of a death row inmate.

Paul Brown has been on death row since 2000 for a double murder. He is a contributing writer to Prison Writers and shares essays on topics such as his childhood, his life as a prisoner, and more.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Capital Punishment: Pros and Cons of the Death Penalty

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The death penalty, also known as capital punishment, is the lawful imposition of death as punishment for a crime. In 2004 four (China, Iran, Vietnam, and the US) accounted for 97% of all global executions. On average, every 9-10 days a government in the United States executes a prisoner.

It is the Eighth Amendment , the constitutional clause that prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishment, which is at the center of the debate about capital punishment in America. Although most Americans support capital punishment under some circumstances, according to Gallup support for capital punishment has dropped dramatically from a high of 80% in 1994 to about 60% today.

Facts and Figures

Red state executions per million population are an order of magnitude greater than blue state executions (46.4 v 4.5). Blacks are executed at a rate significantly disproportionate to their share of the overall population.

Based on 2000 data , Texas ranked 13th in the country in violent crime and 17th in murders per 100,000 citizens. However, Texas leads the nation in death penalty convictions and executions.

Since the 1976 Supreme Court decision that reinstated the death penalty in the United States, the governments of the United States had executed 1,136, as of December 2008. The 1,000th execution, North Carolina's Kenneth Boyd, occurred in December 2005. There were 42 executions in 2007 .

More than 3,300 prisoners were serving death-row sentences in the US in December 2008. Nationwide, juries are delivering fewer death sentences: since the late 1990s, they have dropped 50%. The violent crime rate has also dropped dramatically since the mid-90s, reaching the lowest level ever recorded in 2005.

Latest Developments

In 2007, the Death Penalty Information Center released a report, “ A Crisis of Confidence: Americans’ Doubts About the Death Penalty .”

The Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty should reflect the "conscience of the community," and that its application should be measured against society's "evolving standards of decency. This latest report suggests that 60% of Americans do not believe that the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. Moreover, almost 40% believe that their moral beliefs would disqualify them from serving on a capital case.

And when asked whether they prefer the death penalty or life in prison without parole as punishment for murder, the respondents were split: 47% death penalty, 43% prison, 10% unsure. Interestingly, 75% believe that a "higher degree of proof" is required in a capital case than in a "prison as punishment" case. (poll margin of error +/- ~3%)

In addition, since 1973 more than 120 people have had their death row convictions overturned. DNA testing has resulted in 200 non-capital cases to be overturned since 1989. Mistakes like these shake public confidence in the capital punishment system. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that almost 60% of those polled—including almost 60% of the southerners—in this study believe that the United States should impose a moratorium on the death penalty.

An ad hoc moratorium is almost in place. After the 1,000th execution in December 2005, there were almost no executions in 2006 or the first five months of 2007.

Executions as a form of punishment date to at least the 18th century BC. In America, Captain George Kendall was executed in 1608 in the Jamestown Colony of Virginia; he was accused of being a spy for Spain. In 1612, Virginia's death penalty violations included what modern citizens would consider minor violations: stealing grapes, killing chickens and trading with Indigenous peoples.

In the 1800s, abolitionists took up the cause of capital punishment, relying in part on Cesare Beccaria's 1767 essay, On Crimes and Punishment .

From the 1920s-1940s, criminologists argued that the death penalty was a necessary and preventative social measure. The 1930s, also marked by the Depression, saw more executions than any other decade in our history.

From the 1950s-1960s, public sentiment turned against capital punishment , and the number executed plummeted. In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled in Trop v. Dulles that the Eighth Amendment contained an "evolving standard of decency that marked the progress of a maturing society." And according to Gallup, public support reached an all-time low of 42% in 1966.

Two 1968 cases caused the nation to rethink its capital punishment law. In U.S. v. Jackson , the Supreme Court ruled that requiring that the death penalty be imposed only upon recommendation of a jury was unconstitutional because it encouraged defendants to plead guilty to avoid trial. In Witherspoon v. Illinois , the Court ruled on juror selection; having a "reservation" was insufficient cause for dismissal in a capital case.

In June 1972, the Supreme Court (5 to 4) effectively voided death penalty statutes in 40 states and commuted the sentences of 629 death row inmates. In Furman v. Georgia , the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment with sentencing discretion was "cruel and unusual" and thus violated the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In 1976, the Court ruled that capital punishment itself was constitutional while holding that new death penalty laws in Florida, Georgia and Texas—which included sentencing guidelines, bifurcated trials, and automatic appellate review—were constitutional.

A ten-year moratorium on executions that had begun with the Jackson and Witherspoon ended on 17 January 1977 with the execution of Gary Gilmore by firing squad in Utah.

There are two common arguments in support of capital punishment : that of deterrence and that of retribution.

According to Gallup, most Americans believe that the death penalty is a deterrent to homicide, which helps them justify their support for capital punishment. Other Gallup research suggests that most Americans would not support capital punishment if it did not deter murder.

Does capital punishment deter violent crimes? In other words, will a potential murderer consider the possibility that they might be convicted and face the death penalty before committing murder? The answer appears to be "no."

Social scientists have mined empirical data searching for the definitive answer on deterrence since the early 20th century. And "most deterrence research has found that the death penalty has virtually the same effect as long imprisonment on homicide rates." Studies suggesting otherwise (notably, writings of Isaac Ehrlich from the 1970s) have been, in general, criticized for methodological errors. Ehrlich's work was also criticized by the National Academy of Sciences - but it is still cited as a rationale for deterrence.

A 1995 survey of police chiefs and country sheriffs found that most ranked the death penalty last in a list of six options that might deter violent crime. Their top two picks? Reducing drug abuse and fostering an economy that provides more jobs.

Data on murder rates seem to discredit the deterrence theory as well. The region of the county with the greatest number of executions—the South—is the region with the largest murder rates. For 2007, the average murder rate in states with the death penalty was 5.5; the average murder rate of the 14 states without the death penalty was 3.1. Thus deterrence, which is offered as a reason to support capital punishment ("pro"), doesn't wash.

Retribution

In Gregg v Georgia , the Supreme Court wrote that "[t]he instinct for retribution is part of the nature of man..." The theory of retribution rests, in part, on the Old Testament and its call for "an eye for an eye." Proponents of retribution argue that "the punishment must fit the crime." According to The New American : "Punishment—sometimes called retribution—is the main reason for imposing the death penalty."

Opponents of retribution theory believe in the sanctity of life and often argue that it is just as wrong for society to kill as it is for an individual to kill. Others argue that what drives American support for capital punishment is the " impermanent emotion of outrage ." Certainly, emotion not reason seems to be the key behind support for capital punishment.

Some supporters of the death penalty also contend it is less expensive than a life sentence. Nevertheless, at least 47 states do have life sentences without the possibility of parole. Of those, at least 18 have no possibility of parole. And according to the ACLU :

The most comprehensive death penalty study in the country found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million more per execution than a non-death penalty murder case with a sentence of life imprisonment (Duke University, May 1993). In its review of death penalty expenses, the State of Kansas concluded that capital cases are 70% more expensive than comparable non-death penalty cases.

More than 1000 religious leaders  have written an open letter to America and its leaders:

We join with many Americans in questioning the need for the death penalty in our modern society and in challenging the effectiveness of this punishment, which has consistently been shown to be ineffective, unfair, and inaccurate... With the prosecution of even a single capital case costing millions of dollars, the cost of executing 1,000 people has easily risen to billions of dollars. In light of the serious economic challenges that our country faces today, the valuable resources that are expended to carry out death sentences would be better spent investing in programs that work to prevent crime, such as improving education, providing services to those with mental illness, and putting more law enforcement officers on our streets. We should make sure that money is spent to improve life, not destroy it... As people of faith, we take this opportunity to reaffirm our opposition to the death penalty and to express our belief in the sacredness of human life and in the human capacity for change.

In 2005, Congress considered the Streamlined Procedures Act (SPA), which would have amended the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). AEDPA placed restrictions on the power of federal courts to grant writs of habeas corpus to state prisoners. The SPA would have imposed additional limits on the ability of state inmates to challenge the constitutionality of their imprisonment through habeas corpus.

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Life in Prison, or the Death Penalty?

What Chekhov has to tell us about capital punishment

The Anton Chekhov short story “The Bet” opens with a morbid dinner conversation. The guests debate which is worse—to rot in prison forever, or to be killed swiftly? The attorney general, Bill Barr, weighed in last week on the side of Chekhov’s banker, a rich man who favors capital punishment. (Barr announced that the federal government will resume killing those convicted of capital offenses, a practice it had stopped nearly 20 years ago.) At the banker’s table, a younger man disagrees. They make a bet: If the young man spends 15 years in the rich man’s guest cottage, with food and reading material of his choice slipped under the door but no other human contact, at the end of his captivity he will inherit a large portion of the banker’s fortune. He can leave whenever he wishes, but would then forfeit his prize.

If any crime deserves capital punishment, it is spoiling Chekhov stories, so I will not reveal much more. (You can read the whole story here , in about seven minutes.) The tale unfolds from the jailer’s perspective, and through lists of books the prisoner requests. The requests are fleeting silhouettes of the man, cast ever more enigmatically as his eager youth dissipates and he becomes, in isolation, something less or more than human. The banker and the prisoner both end up humbled, at various points, as they realize they had wagered confidently on matters they could not comprehend: death on the one hand, and the effects of long-term captivity on the other.

Garrett Epps: Debunking the Court’s latest death-penalty obsession

Barr, in his statement announcing the resumption of executions, showed no such humility. He gave, as a reason for the resumption, the fact that Congress has authorized executions, which seems to me a rather weak argument for killing a man. The Department of Justice press release also detailed the crimes of the five men whose deaths are now scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020. These lurid descriptions likewise fell short of a reason to kill the men, since no one disputed that they had committed heinous crimes, only that the federal government should kill them.

Where would Chekhovian humility deliver us? Faced with two alternatives—each a punishment whose consequences are inconceivable to punisher and punished alike—one option is to apply neither. I am in Norway, where the last person executed was a Nazi collaborator, Ragnar Skancke, in 1948, and even the most heinous crimes now receive a punishment of no more than 21 years (with extensions possible if the criminal remains a threat to public safety). Under this theory, both punishments contemplated by U.S. policy makers are like untested drugs. We have very little sense of what happens when you administer death or life imprisonment to a person, and rather than play Mengele, we should confine ourselves to punishments that are conceivable to us. Every adult has at least a sense of what 21 years feels like. One side benefit of this view is that the punishments are also more likely to be conceivable to the criminals, and a conceivable punishment may deter more effectively than one that is abstract.

Andrea D. Lyon: For Trump and Barr, executions are a statement

I am on Barr’s side, however, in one respect. There are crimes that deserve death, and indeed there are crimes that deserve a death at least as painful as the one dealt out regularly to death-penalty victims in the United States. Certain crimes are so depraved that merely to witness or read about them is to feel traumatized and victimized, secondhand. If you think no human deserves to suffer before dying, then I hope you never lose your innocence.

Some people deserve to be executed. But does anyone, or any state, deserve to be an executioner? That, I think, is a harder question, and I admit my moral hunches lead me to answer in the negative. But hunches aren’t persuasive as policy arguments, and Barr’s may well push him in the opposite direction. These hunches should be subjected to argument and consideration, of the type not evident in any of Barr’s comments about his own recent decision.

Some argue that the hangman performs a noble service, a professional duty that relieves him of moral burdens, just as a surgeon has no duty to investigate whether her patient deserves to be healed. One difference between a hangman and a surgeon, however, is that to kill a man nowadays requires relatively little expertise.

If we must choose between life imprisonment and the death penalty, then, I would suggest certain modifications of the latter, apart from the obligatory examination of whether it is applied fairly and accurately (which, by all evidence, it is not).

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If we are to have such a penalty, we should implement it in a way that forces more contemplation of the penalty by the citizens implicated in it. Conducting executions publicly would be one especially grotesque way—but it would also be imperfect, since anyone could just look away, and in any case, a public spectacle would further degrade the dignity of the victim and the proceedings. In classical Islamic law, executions and other punishments are required to be public, and in France, public executions continued until the Second World War.

Instead, I suggest, if we are to kill criminals, that the execution be conducted not by professionals, but by a randomly selected adult citizen. The model would be jury duty or conscription. If your number is called, you must report to the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, and be ready at an appointed time to read the sentence aloud to the criminal and press a button that sends pentobarbital into his veins. The duty would end once the selected citizen failed to find a pulse.

Samuel Johnson famously said that the prospect of an execution concentrates the mind wonderfully. The likelihood of selection, for any individual, would, of course, be infinitesimally low. But even the unlikely prospect of selection should concentrate the minds of citizens, too, and make the act of institutional killing slightly more conceivable. As Albert Camus wrote in “Reflections on the Guillotine,” “If people are shown the machine, made to touch the wood and steel and to hear the sound of a head falling, then public imagination [will be] suddenly awakened.” I see little to lose from more concentrated thought about life and death.

March 19, 2024

Evidence Does Not Support the Use of the Death Penalty

Capital punishment must come to an end. It does not deter crime, is not humane and has no moral or medical basis

By The Editors

A death penalty vigil, held in 2021 outside an Indiana penitentiary.

Bryan Woolston/Reuters/Redux

It is long past time to abolish the death penalty in the U.S.

Capital punishment was halted in the U.S. in 1972 but reinstated in 1976, and since then, nearly 1,600 people have been executed. To whose gain? Study after study shows that the death penalty does not deter crime, puts innocent people to death , is racially biased , and is cruel and inhumane. It is state-sanctioned homicide, wholly ineffective, often botched, and a much more expensive punishment than life imprisonment. There is no ethical, scientifically supported, medically acceptable or morally justifiable way to carry it out.

The recent execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith demonstrates this barbarity. After a failed attempt at lethal injection by prison officials seemingly inexperienced in the placement of an IV, the state of Alabama killed Smith in January using nitrogen gas . The Alabama attorney general claimed that this method of execution was fast and humane , despite no supporting evidence. Eyewitnesses recounted that Smith thrashed during the nitrogen administration and took more than 20 minutes to die.

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Opposition to the death penalty is growing among the American public , and the Biden administration must follow through on its promise to end this horror. The Department of Justice must heed its own admission that the death penalty doesn’t stop crime, and our legislators must continue to take up the issue on the congressional floor. The few states that still condemn people to death must follow the lead of states that have considered the evidence and rejected capital punishment.

Programs such as the Innocence Project have shown, over and over, that innocent people have been sentenced to death. Since 1973 nearly 200 people on death row have been exonerated, based on appeals, the reopening of cases, and the entrance of new and sometimes previously suppressed evidence. People have recanted testimony, and supposedly airtight cases have been poked full of evidentiary holes.

Through the death penalty, the criminal justice system has killed at least 20 people now believed to have been innocent and uncounted others whose cases have not been reexamined . Too many of these victims have been Black or Hispanic. This is not justice. These are state-sanctioned hate crimes.

Using rigorous statistical and experimental control methods, both economics and criminal justice studies have consistently found that there is no evidence for deterrence of violent crimes in states that allow capital punishment. One such study, a 2009 paper by criminology researchers at the University of Dallas, outlines experimental and statistical flaws in econometrics-based death penalty studies that claim to find a correlated reduction in violent crime. The death penalty does not stop people from killing. Executions don’t make us safer.

The methods used to kill prisoners are inhumane. Electrocution fails , causing significant pain and suffering. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist who criticizes the use of medicines in carrying out the death penalty, has found (at the request of lawyers of death row inmates) that the lungs of prisoners who were killed by lethal injection were often heavy with fluid and froth that suggested they were struggling to breathe and felt like they were drowning. Nitrogen gas is used in some veterinary euthanasia, but based in part on the behavior of rats in its presence, it is “unacceptable” for mammals , according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. This means that Smith, as his lawyers claimed in efforts to stop his execution, became a human subject in an immoral experiment.

Courts have often decided, against the abundant evidence, that these killings are constitutional and do not fall under the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the 8th Amendment or, in Smith’s appeal , both the 8th Amendment and the due process protection clause of the 14th amendment.

A small number of prosecutors and judges in a few states, mostly in the South, are responsible for most of the death sentences being handed down in the U.S. today. It’s a power they should not be able to wield. Smith was sentenced to life in prison by a jury before the judge in his case overruled the jury and gave him the death sentence.

A furious urge for vengeance against those who have done wrong—or those we think have done wrong—is the biggest motivation for the death penalty. But this desire for violent retribution is the very impulse that our criminal justice system is made to check, not abet. Elected officials need to reform this aspect of our justice system at both the state and federal levels. Capital punishment does not stop crime and mocks both justice and humanity. The death penalty in the U.S. must come to an end.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American .

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Death Penalty — The Death Penalty: An Argument for its Advantages

The Death Penalty: an Argument for Its Advantages

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Words: 859 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 859 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, historical context of the death penalty, deterrence effect of the death penalty, justice for the victims and society, cost-effectiveness and efficiency of the death penalty, fairness and due process of the death penalty, possible reforms and improvements, counterarguments and rebuttals, ix. conclusion.

• Marzilli Eric, J. (2019). The death penalty deters crime and saves lives. Boston Herald. Retrieved from https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/08/28/the-death-penalty-deters-crime-and-saves-lives/
• McGuigan, K. (2020). The facts: The death penalty is necessary. The Daily Signal. Retrieved from https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/06/30/the-facts-the-death-penalty-is-necessary
• Olcott, E. (2018). The death penalty is flawed but necessary. The Hill. Retrieved from https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/420817-the-death-penalty-is-flawed-but-necessary

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