Capital punishment and the practice of the death penalty is an issue that is passionately debated in the United States. Opponents of the death penalty claim that capital punishment is unnecessary since a life sentence accomplishes the same objective. What death penalty opponents neglect to tell you is that convicted murders and child rapists escape from prison every year(List of prison escapes, 2015). As I write this essay, police are searching for two convicted murders who escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York on June 6th, 2015. The ONLY punishment from which one cannot escape is the deathpenalty.
Opponents of the death penalty believe capital punishment is unnecessary and inappropriate in our modern...show more content...
A fifth rationale in opposition is that the death penalty is too expensive or too costly to taxpayers to justify its use. According to those who oppose the death penalty and certain studies, it costs more to execute a person than to keep him or her in prison for life (Death Penalty Focus, 2015). Finally, it is believed by some that the killing at the hands of the state is not a righteous act but instead is on the same moral level as the murderers themselves.
According to capital punishment supporters, many of these reasons of the anti–death penalty movement are false and are now wrongly accepted as fact. The argument that the death penalty does not deter crime is debatable. By executing murderers you prevent them from murdering again. If these people no longer exist then they obviously cannot commit more crimes. In addition, criminals have admitted, in thousands of fully documented cases, that the death penalty was the specific threat which deterred them from committing murder (Pro–Death Penalty, 2014). The opponents of capital punishment claim that the death penalty has caused and can cause the execution of innocent people. However, according to the supporters, no evidence indicates that innocent people have been executed. Upon reviewing 23 years of capital sentences, a Wall Street Journal study indicated that they were unable to find a single case in which an innocent person was executed (Eddlem, 2002). Furthermore, advocates note that the Get