The application of the death penalty as a form of punishment for various capital offences has been a matter of debate for many years. In this essay, I will concentrate on murder convicts and argue that the death penalty is non-excessive on the grounds of retributivism and general deterrence. This form of punishment is in line with the concept of proportionality as the criminal deserves to be punished in proportion to the severity of the crime and the marginal deterrence produced is also proportional to the seriousness of the crime.
A fundamental requirement of retributivist justice is making the punishment fit the crime. The strict equality interpretation of retributivist justice or ‘lex talionis’, holds that the offender deserves the amount of punishment equivalent to the moral seriousness of the offense. According to Kant, “The undeserved evil which anyone commits on another is to be regarded as perpetuated on himself.” However, one weakness of this interpretation is that it is often both impossible and impractical for our social institutions to inflict the very same kind of suffering on the offender as he has imposed on others. This can be observed for crimes …show more content…
This objection is firstly supported by the lack of convincing empirical evidence proving that the death penalty is a deterrent marginally superior to long-term imprisonment (Radelet and Akers 1996). And secondly, by a point raised by Reiman that there is no evidence to show that the deterrence impact of a penalty rises without limit in proportion to the fearfulness of the penalty. Reiman suggests that people’s disinclination to commit murder could max out at the fear of life imprisonment and although the death penalty may be more fearsome, there is no extra marginal deterrent effect
A fundamental requirement of retributivist justice is making the punishment fit the crime. The strict equality interpretation of retributivist justice or ‘lex talionis’, holds that the offender deserves the amount of punishment equivalent to the moral seriousness of the offense. According to Kant, “The undeserved evil which anyone commits on another is to be regarded as perpetuated on himself.” However, one weakness of this interpretation is that it is often both impossible and impractical for our social institutions to inflict the very same kind of suffering on the offender as he has imposed on others. This can be observed for crimes …show more content…
This objection is firstly supported by the lack of convincing empirical evidence proving that the death penalty is a deterrent marginally superior to long-term imprisonment (Radelet and Akers 1996). And secondly, by a point raised by Reiman that there is no evidence to show that the deterrence impact of a penalty rises without limit in proportion to the fearfulness of the penalty. Reiman suggests that people’s disinclination to commit murder could max out at the fear of life imprisonment and although the death penalty may be more fearsome, there is no extra marginal deterrent effect